Avoiding Backlash and Backsliding: Human Rights Reporting Strategies and Abuse

• In Event: International Cooperation and Resistance in Human Rights Promotion Campaigns

Abstract

While most human rights advocates focus attention on problematic states’ practices, some actors combine criticism with acknowledgment of progress. Do such mixed approaches make a difference, and if so, how? The proposed paper discerns between three human rights promotion strategies: a critical approach, a positive approach, and a combination of the two former approaches. Building on research on human rights promotion effectiveness and backlash, it hypothesizes that exclusively critical strategies and exclusively positive strategies would have a negative effect on human rights. The reason for this is that these approaches trigger backlash and backsliding responses in the target countries. The paper then hypothesizes that combining these approaches will avoid backlash and regression effects by mitigating reform costs and clarifying international expectations. A combined approach should, therefore, result in an improvement in human rights practices. The paper utilizes new data capturing UN treaty bodies’ reporting approaches to test these arguments. The results indicate that criticism with no positive feedback and positive feedback with no criticism are each associated with worse human rights practices. However, the combination of these approaches is associated with human rights improvements. The paper concludes that the choice of human rights promotion strategy makes a difference in terms of human rights advocacy effectiveness and makes policy recommendations following this conclusion.

Author

• Sara Kahn-Nisser, The Open University of Israel