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International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.

We examine patterns of citizen participation in the global human rights movement through memberships in human rights international nongovernmental organizations (HRINGOs). After showing enormous growth in the number ofHRINGOs in recent decades, we investigate country level characteristics leading to greater participation in the international human rights movement. Drawing on the social movement literature and world society theory, we employ multivariate regression analyses to explain HRINGO memberships in 1978, 1988. To understand changes over time, we also use panel analyses for 1978-88 and 1988. The strongest predictors of memberships in HRINGOs are found to be embeddedness in global civil society and international jlows ofhuman resources. The effects ofthese international factors grew stronger over time while domestic fa ctors became less important.

This study explores, with quantitative data analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records. The study's core arguments are (1) that the deepening international human rights regime creates opportunities for rights-violating governments to display low-cost legitimating commitments to world norms, leading them to ratify human rights treaties without the capacity or willingness to comply with the provisions; and (2) that among repressive regimes, autonomous ones that are less constrained by domestic forces are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as symbolic commitment, because these sovereigns are free to entertain high levels of decoupling between policy and practice, while constrained governments are more reluctant to incite domestic (and foreign) oppositions and interest groups. The combined outcome is that repressive states ratify human rights treaties at least as frequently as non-repressive onesparticularly those repressive states that have greater autonomy. Our cross-national time-series analyses provide supportive evidence for these arguments.keywords: human rights ✦ international treaty ✦ world societyThe world human rights movement has been an enormous and surprising success in putting forward high standards for states and societies to follow. It has created a striking array of international treaties (Buergenthal, 1995;