Implementing Human Rights Decisions: Reflections, Successes, and New Directions

In 2010, the Open Society Justice Initiative published a landmark report, which examined which states comply with the decisions of international and regional human right bodies, including the three regional human rights systems in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the UN treaty body system.

The results were sobering. The report concluded that an “implementation crisis” afflicted the systems—or rather their member states. A follow-up report (2013), further explored the crucial role of domestic structures in promoting—and sometimes thwarting—implementation across the three primary institutions of government: the executive, legislature, and in domestic courts.

Together, these reports helped define a field of implementation advocacy that has grown substantially over the past decade. Now, after hundreds of interviews with state officials, judges, court personnel, lawyers, and advocates, new findings stress that implementation is most certainly occurring and that state authorities, victims, and the broad range of stakeholders at the national and international level still consider this to be a worthwhile endeavor and one in which they are prepared to invest.