How Do NGO Lobbying Efforts at the UN Matter? Insights from Japanese Migrant Rights Advocacy

• In Event: 40862 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Human Rights Roundtable 1

Abstract

Over the past quarter century, the Japanese Government has submitted periodic reports to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and participated in four CERD review sessions (in 2001, 2010, 2014, and 2018) that – with the input from Japanese civil society organizations (CSOs) – have produced official UN written recommendations (i.e., Concluding Observations [COs] to the Japanese government on how to improve situations regarding racial discrimination in Japan. For each of the four review sessions, publicly available documents released by the CERD, the Japanese government, and Japanese CSO groups are coded to quantify each party’s level of interest/concern in 26 distinct issue areas. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), this data is analyzed to ascertain the sufficient and necessary conditions under which an issue can be expected to receive explicit and extensive mentionings in CERD’s COs to the Japanese government. Must a particular combination of these three parties express high levels of interest in an issue during a review session in order for that issue to be included in CERD’s COs? Must there be continuity/repetition in the problematization of a specific issue across multiple review sessions for the issue to appear in CERD’s COs? The study’s findings highlight the incremental yet definitive impact CSOs have on the maintenance and (re-)shaping of international human rights norms championed by a UN treaty body committee, and complement previous studies’ assertions that domestic advocacy CSOs can and do matter in (re-)constructing the very global human rights norms that legitimize the legal and moral grounds on which the claims to their own government are made.

Author

• Ralph Ittonen Hosoki, Sophia University