United Nations endorsement and support for human rights: An experiment on women’s rights in Pakistan
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343320912839 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
United Nations endorsement and support
for human rights: An experiment on
women’s rights in Pakistan
Gulnaz Anjum
Institute of Business Administration Karachi
Adam Chilton
University of Chicago Law School
Zahid Usman
Quaid-i-Azam University
Abstract
The United Nations is one of the organizations charged with developing and promoting international human rights
law. One of the primary ways that the United Nations tries to do that is by regularly reviewing the human rights
practices of member states and then recommending new policies for that state to implement. Although this expends
considerable resources, a number of obstacles have made it difficult to empirically assess whether the UN’s review
process actually causes countries to improve their human rights practices. To study this topic, we conducted an
experiment in Pakistan that tested whether respondents were more likely to support policies aimed at improving
women’s rights when they learned that the reforms were proposed by the United Nations. Our results indicate that
the respondents who were randomly informed of the United Nations endorsement not only expressed higher support
for the policy reforms, but also were more likely to express willingness to ‘mobilize’ in ways that would help the
reforms be implemented. Our treatment did not have any effect, however, on respondents that did not already have
confidence in the United Nations. This suggests that the international human rights regime may only be able to aid
domestic reformers when there is already faith in those institutions.
Keywords
human rights, international law, survey experiment, United Nations, women’s rights
Introduction
A web of international human rights agreements and
institutions regulates how governments treat their citi-
zens. Scholars vigorously debate, however, whether this
web actually causes countries to improve their human
rights practices. Critics of the system argue that, because
of a number of shortcomings, international human rights
law has failed to achieve its objectives (e.g. Posner, 2014;
Hopgood, 2013; Moyn, 2010). For example, these scho-
lars argue that weak enforcement mechanisms and the
proliferation of rights have made the human rights
regime ineffective. Defenders of the system argue that,
despite its flaws, international human rights law has pro-
duced dividends in at least some circumstances (e.g.
Goodman & Jinks, 2013; Sikkink, 2011; Simmons,
2009). For example, these scholars argue that domestic
political actors have an easier time generating support for
reforms when the international human rights system
lends credibility to their efforts.
But scholars on both sides of this debate have agreed
that direct pressure is unlikely to lead countries to change
Corresponding author:
adamchilton@uchicago.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(3) 462–478
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343320912839
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their behavior. Notably, international organizations can-
not directly sanction countries for failing to improve
their human rights practices. Instead, international orga-
nizations have to rely on indirect forms of pressure. For
instance, the United Nations (UN) human rights com-
mittees review member states’ human rights practices
and then issue reports wit h suggested policy refor ms.
Countries are not directly punished for failing to adopt
the recommendations contained in the reports, but the
hope is that the reports generate ideas and create pressure
to reform.
Where there is disagreement, however, is whether
these indirect forms of pressure actually change human
rights practices. One possibility is that the reports issued
by international organizations increase the probability
that human rights reforms will be adopted, because the
ideas contained within them will enjoy greater support
when they are endorsed by prominent organizations like
the UN. Notably, a line of research has suggested that
domestic interest groups are able to leverage the ratifica-
tion of international human rights treaties to gain sup-
port for reforms within their country (Simmons, 2009),
and it is similarly possible that domestic organizations
could leverage recommendations by the UN to generate
support for reform. Moreover, research has also sug-
gested that people may be more likely to support reforms
when they are endorsed by the UN (Linos, 2011, 2013).
This theory suggests that UN endorsement should
increase public support for human rights reforms. But
it is difficult to test this theory with observational data
because the UN likely chooses which reforms to endorse
based on their political viability. Given that reality, there
is unsurprisingly little research on whether the UN’s
investment in generating the reports has produced
dividends.
We test the hypothesis that UN endorsement
increases support for policies aimed at improving human
rights. To do so, we conducted an experiment during
interviews in Pakistan on support for women’s rights
reforms. We choose Pakistan for our experiment because
it is a developing country that is partially democratic and
because there is a great deal of variance in views about
human rights within the country. As a result, Pakistan is
the kind of country in which previous research has sug-
gested human rights law might be able to make a differ-
ence (Simmons, 2009). We choose to focus on women’s
rights because the UN had recently issued a report sug-
gesting specific policy reforms to improve women’s
rights in Pakistan that we were able to leverage for our
experiment, and because the status of women’s rights is a
salient political topic in Pakistan. Moreover, previous
research using observational data has suggested that the
Convention for Elimination of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW) may have helped improve women’s
rights (Richards & Haglund, 2015; Cole, 2013; Hill,
2010; Simmons, 2009), but this finding has not been
the subject of experimental research.
A team of six researchers administered our experiment
during interviews with 614 respondents in Pakistan in
December 2014 and January 2015. The respondents
were all asked whether they agreed with four policy pro-
posals aimed at improving the rights of women. The
proposals were from a 2013 report produced by the
UN CEDAW committee on the status of Pakistan’s
compliance with its commitments to the rights of
women. Half of the respondents were asked whether
they support the proposals without information on
where the proposals came from, while the other half of
the respondents were told that the policies were pro-
posed by the UN.
Our experiment found that UN endorsement had a
substantively large and statistically significant effect on
support for all four proposals. Moreover, the results of
the experiment suggest that respondents that were told of
the UN’s endorsement for reforms also expressed greater
willingness to mobilize to support human rights. But our
treatment had no effect on respondents that did not
already have confidence in the UN. Although our experi-
ment has clear limitations – most notably, we used a
convenience sample that was not representative of the
population of Pakistan – it does provide qualified evi-
dence that the international human rights regime can aid
domestic activists hoping to mobilize support for reform.
However, those effects are likely to be small unless there
is already faith in the relevant international institutions.
Background
The international human rights system
The international human rights system includes a num-
ber of treaties and institutions designed to protect people
from having their rights violated. Many of these treaties
and institutions have been developed and promoted by
the UN. For instance, the UN has developed several core
international human rights treaties. These treaties have
been widely ratified, and they protect a large number of
different rights. The ICCPR alone, for example, protects
58 different rights (Posner, 2014: 152–154).
The UN has also created several institutions charged
with improving human rights protections. The UN
Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights
promotes and coordinates the UN’s policies towards
Anjum et al. 463
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