Despite being a wealthy democracy and strong supporter of the international system, Japan has consistently recognized very few refugees. This article explores this conundrum. Specifically, it asks whether Japan's low recognition rate signifies a lack of compliance with norms of international refugee protection and, after concluding in the affirmative, why this might be the case. The latter question is addressed systematically, using rationalist, normative and domestic institutional theories of international compliance. After proposing several potential factors, this article concludes by discussing how these factors can be addressed so as to promote a higher rate of Japanese refugee recognition.
Transgovernmental networks have played a prominent role in the evolution and development of national human rights institutions ('NHRIs') by promoting cooperation, best practices, and engagement at the international level, and providing NHRIs with legitimacy through the accreditation process. The role that transgovernmental networks play in the development of subnational human rights institutions ('SNHRIs'), however, has yet to be examined. This article attempts to fill this gap by comparing networking patterns of national and sub-national human rights institutions. This article concludes that while SNHRIs are able to derive certain benefits from their membership in ombudsman associations, they are currently missing out on many of the other benefits that NHRIs derive from their membership in the International Coordinating Committee for National Institutions for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights ('ICC') and its affiliated networks. This article therefore proposes that the ICC establish a separate membership category for SNHRIs, with membership conditioned on compliance with a set of principles based on the Paris Principles, but revised so as to be applicable to sub-national bodies.
This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
Permanent repository link:http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/20568/ Link to published version: http://dx.Abstract: In this paper, I argue that independent governmental human rights bodies at the subnational level now comprise a meaningful group that can be understood as a sub-national counterpart to National Human Rights Institutions. In accordance with the term's growing usage among human rights practitioners, I label these bodies as 'Sub-national Human Rights Institutions' ('SNHRIs'). So far, however, SNHRIs (as a general concept) have been the subject of very little academic attention, although there have been many studies of individual SNHRIs or particular types of SNHRIs. With the objective of promoting coherent and generalizable research into this relatively new institutional concept, in this paper I therefore stipulate and justify a general SNHRI definition and a scientific typology of SNHRIs based on administrative level, institutional form, and breadth of mandate.
While the domestication of international human rights law has been intensively studied in recent years, little attention has been paid to the domestication role of sub-national human rights institutions, meaning those ombudsmen, human rights commissions, and similar independent non-judicial governmental institutions that possess subnational mandates, and whose mission includes the implementation of human rights norms. Th is article demonstrates that sub-national human rights institutions around the world are not simply local institutions implementing local norms. Rather, they are increasingly involved in the domestication of international human rights law through their quasi-judicial resolution of disputes, promotion of governmental compliance with international norms; promotion of international norms in civil society; promotion of the use of international norms by the courts, and use of international norms as standards in human rights monitoring. Th e article explores the implications of these actions, and how the sub-national human rights institutions add to the existing domestication of international norms by national-level actors.
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