The In(significance) of Legal Status: Comparing Compliance with Regional Human Rights Courts' and UN Treaty Bodies' Decisions

A central issue in designing global governance instruments is whether they should be made legally binding or not. In the international human rights domain, the question about the role of legal bindingness arises especially with regard to the decisions of international monitoring bodies in individual complaints cases: decisions rendered by regional human rights courts are legally binding, while the decisions issued by the United Nations human rights treaty bodies are not. How significant a factor is legal status when it comes to affecting state behavior? Although the importance of legal bindingness for compliance with human rights decisions is often assumed, it has yet to be systematically assessed. We argue that legal bindingness generally promotes compliance but that its effect on compliance with human rights decisions depends on the strength of a state's commitment to the rule of law. We hypothesize that legal status operates through three causal pathways: identity, reputation, and mobilization. As to identity, the ‘moral obligation’ to follow legally binding obligations can be expected to be particularly strong for states that are seriously committed to the rule of law. Since the rule of law is premised on a hierarchy of norms, we expect that the reputational costs of non-compliance with legally binding laws will typically be higher than with non-binding ones. Lastly, we conjecture that court judgments can be expected to have a greater effect on political and legal mobilization than non-binding views, which will increase the probability of compliance. To test our expectations, we leverage an original dataset that includes compliance information on more than 2300 decisions issued by nine UN treaty bodies, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights in individual complaint cases between 1979 and 2021. Due to the geographical, temporal, and substantive overlaps between the regional courts on the one hand and the treaty bodies on the other, we are able to assess the role of legal bindingness in a comparative setting. By employing matching and survival analysis techniques and controlling for confounders at the country, institution, and decision levels, we find that legal bindingness doubles the chances of a decision being complied with. Contrary to our argument, the findings of this study suggest that the degree of legal bindingness affects compliance behavior more strongly in states that do not adhere to the rule of law.