International Law and Courts

(2020) "Reserving Rights: Explaining Human Rights Treaty Reservations."International Studies Quarterly 64(4): 785–797.

Authors: Kelebogile Zvobgo, Wayne Sandholtz, and Suzie Mulesky

2019 Best Paper Award, Human Rights Section, American Political Science Association

International relations scholarship has made significant strides in explaining how states design treaty obligations and why they accept treaty commitments. However, far less attention has been paid to factors that may influence states’ modification of their treaty obligations via reservations. We theorize that states will be more likely to enter reservations when treaty obligations increase compliance costs and policy adjustment costs. More specifically, we expect that demanding provisions, i.e., provisions that create strong, precise obligations requiring domestic action, will enhance the likelihood of reservation. To test our theory, we exploit an original dataset that codes reservations at the provision (treaty–article–paragraph) level for the ten core international human rights treaties. Consistent with our expectations, we find that states are more likely to enter reservations on more demanding treaty provisions. In contrast to prior studies, our results indicate that reservations are not driven purely by state-level characteristics such as regime type or the nature of the legal system. Rather, it appears that states weigh individual treaty obligations and calibrate their commitments accordingly.

(2021) "Stay the Hand of Justice? US Resistance to the International Criminal Court." In Boyer, Mark, A. and Cameron Thies (Editors). Forum: Did "America First" Construct America Irrelevant? International Studies Perspectives 22(4): 483–486.

Author: Kelebogile Zvobgo

Read three related articles from April 2019, February 2021, and April 2021 in The Washington Post

The United States, a key architect of global governance institutions in the twentieth century, has moderated its international engagement in the twenty-first century. In climate governance, the United States signed but did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, then acceded to but ultimately withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. In trade, the United States entered but later abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And in human rights, the United States failed to join core treaties like the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The United States’ withdrawal from these and other international regimes sparks the question: Has “America First” made America irrelevant? I focus my answer to this question on the United States’ refusal to join the ICC, the apogee of the international criminal justice system that it helped build. I argue that, despite the efforts of antiglobalists and rule-of-law obstructionists like Donald Trump, the United States remains relevant to international criminal justice and may yet strengthen it, albeit unintentionally.

(2024) "Social Pressure in the International Human Rights Regime: Why States Withdraw Treaty Reservations."

British Journal of Political Science 54(1): 241–259.

Authors: Christina Boyes, Cody D. Eldredge, Megan Shannon, and Kelebogile Zvobgo

States often use reservations to modify their treaty obligations. Prior research demonstrates why states enter reservations and why states object to reservations, but little work explains why states withdraw them. We argue that states withdraw reservations in response to international social pressure. Using novel data on reservations and reservation withdrawals for the nine core international human rights treaties, our analyses reveal two factors that compel states to withdraw reservations: (1) pressure from peer states and (2) pressure from human rights treaty bodies conducting periodic reviews. While previous work emphasize domestic factors, our research shows that the international community encourages states to withdraw reservations and strengthen their commitments to human rights and international law.

(2024) "Do Human Rights Treaty Obligations Matter for Ratification?"Journal of Human Rights 23(1): 1–18. *Lead Article*

Authors: Suzie Mulesky, Wayne Sandholtz, and Kelebogile Zvobgo

International relations scholarship assumes that states weigh the costs and benefits of treaty ratification. In human rights, the worse a particular state’s record, the higher the presumptive costs of ratification and the lower the likelihood of ratification. But prior work neglects variation in the extent of obligation that different treaties create. In this article, we argue and demonstrate that (1) human rights treaties differ substantially in the scope and scale of the obligations they contain, (2) this variation can be measured, and (3) it matters for ratification. Treaties that create a larger number of demanding obligations imply greater potential costs of compliance for states. The larger the number of demanding obligations, the more grounds various actors will have to challenge a state’s practices. We analyze innovative data on treaty obligations and commitments for the ten core global human rights treaties to test our propositions, and we find strong support.

(2025) "Complementarity and Public Views on Overlapping International and Domestic Courts." Journal of Politics 87(3): 1028–1044.

Authors: Kelebogile Zvobgo and Stephen Chaudoin

Read four related articles from March 2020 and February 2021 in The Washington Post, November 2021 in Foreign Affairs, and December 2021 in Foreign Policy

Can international organizations (IOs) boost support for their authority? We consider the effectiveness of appeals to the principle of complementarity, which holds that IOs only act when domestic institutions fail. Supporters of IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) frequently use complementarity as an argument to rally support for international action and spur domestic action. We evaluate the effectiveness of complementarity arguments using the largest survey experiment on the ICC to date, with more than 10,000 participants in five countries whose cooperation could be pivotal for the Court: Georgia, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. We find only modest evidence that complementarity arguments improve public support for either ICC investigations or domestic investigations—effects that vary across countries. This suggests that a major argument thought to legitimate IOs may not persuade global publics. Instead, an IO’s negative judgment of domestic actions may be perceived as paternalistic or, in Global South contexts, neocolonial.

(Forthcoming) "Responding to Criticism: Autocratic States and Treaty Reservation Withdrawal." Journal of Human Rights.

Authors: Kelebogile Zvobgo, Megan Shannon, and Cody D. Eldredge

Autocracies, like democracies, use reservations to adjust their treaty commitments. But autocracies receive far greater pressure to withdraw reservations. To what extent is this pressure effective? We show through statistical analyses and case illustrations that autocracies respond to international pressure differently than democracies. Autocracies are more likely to withdraw reservations when facing treaty body reviews and less likely to withdraw reservations in response to peer state objections. We propose explanations for this difference. Autocracies may be more responsive to periodic reviews because they are conducted by technical experts from diverse countries, regions, and political regimes, rather than by states' political representatives. Periodic review is an iterative process that gives autocracies time to address domestic opposition to withdrawing reservations. Yet, autocracies may be less likely to withdraw reservations in response to state objections because they see objections, which primarily originate with Western democracies, as biased, hypocritical, and possibly even neocolonial. Objections are also only filed once and may not have the sustained impact necessary to prompt reservation withdrawal. Our research improves scholarly understanding of autocratic states' engagement with international law and international organizations, and reveals the conditional effects of the international community’s efforts to change state behavior within treaty regimes.

(Forthcoming) "Structural Violence and International Law." In Price, Joshua M., and Alexandra S. Moore (Editors). De Gruyter Handbook of Structural Violence. Berlin, DE: De Gruyter.

Authors: Francesca Parente and Kelebogile Zvobgo

This chapter analyzes international human rights law, focusing on instruments and institutions that most closely intersect with identity-based structural violence. First, we discuss how treaties, courts, and remedies address structural violence against women, racialized groups, and Indigenous Peoples. We detail the advances that both the universal and regional systems have made when it comes to protecting legal-institutional, socio-cultural, and socio-economic rights of marginalized groups, as well as the institutions that help monitor and remedy violations of these rights. Second, we examine where treaties, courts, and remedies do not (but ought to) address structural violence. For example, the 1973 Apartheid Convention, unique in its specific focus on structural violence, has attracted few ratifications and its monitoring mechanism is defunct. Relatedly, treaties, courts, and remedies can all further structural violence, through potentially harmful interpretations of existing law. While these harms are certainly unintended, they may nonetheless have tangible impacts on international law’s ability to address structural violence in meaningful ways.