A paper I’ve been working on for six years—United Nations Endorsement and Support for Human Rights: An Experiment on Women's Rights in Pakistan—was just published (here’s the un-gated version). Given the huge amount of time that went into getting this work published, I thought I’d write a little about what it’s all about. I hope you’ll indulge me.  

International human rights law is a core area of international law. The most prominent part of this body of law is the major international human rights treaties. But in addition to these treaties, the United Nations also has several different organizations that are supposed to push countries to improve their human rights practices. However, despite the considerable effort that has been spent developing these treaties and organizations, there is still constant debate in international relations and international law circles is whether the international human rights system leads countries to change their policies.

 This is because it’s not clear exactly how commitments to international human rights law could actually translate into countries changing their policies. Why is it unclear? Because countries are unlikely to be punished for failing to change their behavior. It’s not like an army of UN soldiers in blue helmets is going to invade countries that don’t live up to their commitments to respect the freedom of speech, and other countries typically aren’t interested in expending much energy in sanctioning foreign governments for human rights abuses.

 But even though external sanctions are unlikely to drive compliance with human rights law, there are other theories about how the existence of this international regime could still lead to better respect for rights. Perhaps the most prominent theory for how this could happen is through so-called “domestic compliance mechanisms.” The idea here is that countries make commitments to international human rights, but then when a given country doesn’t live up to those commitments, various organizations within the country can point to the non-compliance as a way to make the government change its actions.

 For example, civil society groups might be able to get their government to treat women better by publicly arguing that a given policy is unfair to women; but they might have even more luck if they can also say “and our government has signed a treaty that obligated them under international law to change this policy, and they are violating that treaty.” In other words, the existence of the international commitment provides a powerful argument that can be used by groups interested in improving human rights.

For a variety of reasons, this theory is hard to test empirically. For example, human rights improve gradually over time, those improvements are hard to measure, there isn’t great data on civil society groups efforts, and there isn’t a lot of random variation in those obligations. When I was a law student, I published a paper arguing that one way it might be possible to make at least some progress testing the effectiveness of human rights law is by using experiments. Experiments have their own problems, but, among other things, they solve the problem of lack of random variation in the human rights regime.

In 2014, I made this argument while teaching a short course on international law in Germany at the Max Planck Institute of Economics. A PhD student in psychology from Pakistan named Gulnaz Anjum was in the room. Gulnaz was passionate about finding strategies that could help improve women’s rights in Pakistan, and she wanted to see if the “domestic compliance mechanisms” might help make a difference. We immediately started talking about how we could try to test this.

Gulnaz recruited a Pakistani economist she knew named Zahid Usman, and we set out designing an experiment to conduct in Pakistan on whether hearing about international obligations made more supportive of women’s rights. But there were a lot of obstacles to getting this done. For instance, women’s rights activists in Pakistan were being targeted and killed at the exact time that we were hoping to do our project. So we had to find safe places to have conversations with people about their attitudes towards women without putting our team at risk. There were plenty of other hiccups along the way too (e.g. IRB approvals, getting the funding to Pakistan, etc.). But ultimately, we were able to conduct ~600 interviews with people on their views on women’s rights while experimentally testing this theory (Gulnaz gets all the credit for that part of the project).

The experiment basically asked people if they supported various policies that the UN had identified as steps Pakistan should take to improve women’s’ rights. For example, one of the policies we tested is raising the age at which girls are allowed to get married to 18. The experimental manipulation was telling some people that the source of the policy proposals was from a United Nations report. That simple fact, telling people that the policy proposal came from a report on Pakistan’s international obligations, had a huge impact on support for the policy. On a scale of 1 to 5 (from strongly opposing a policy to strongly supporting it), this intervention increased support by about 0.5 points. Moreover, people that were told about the UN’s position on a given policy were also dramatically more likely to say they were willing to take various steps to help support women’s rights in the future.

It’s been a long road to getting this experiment run and published (Gulnaz went from being a grad student to a professor in Karachi during the time we’ve been working on it). And, of course,  of course, there are a lot of limitations with our experiment and plenty qualifications that should be made about what conclusions can be drawn for our results (but you’ll have to read the actual paper to hear those). And Pakistan is at the bottom of most rankings of women’s’ rights, so there is a lot of work to be done. But hopefully this research helps make some progress understanding the ways that international law can be effect way to advance human rights advocacy.