Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture

Abstract

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international Convention Against Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs, but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy in the face of domestic democratic instability.undertook such measures, they would still be protected from prosecution by the president's commander-in-chief powers and by legal doctrines of self-defense and necessity.Although this memo and others argued that the costs of CAT were low, their production appears to be driven by a fear that those costs could be high. Indeed, at the same time that some officials were minimizing the importance of CAT and other international legal commitments, other U.S. officials were arguing that those treaties and accompanying domestic legislation placed substantial constraints on U.S. interrogation procedures. Administration officials as high as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld involved themselves in the details of what kinds of interrogations were allowed. One of Rumsfeld's key memos required that he give direct approval for interrogation techniques not on the list he provided. The documentary history suggests that those interrogation techniques were shaped by careful study of CAT and related rules. Government officials have been so worried about the costs of CAT that Vice President Dick Cheney spent substantial political capital and risked his personal reputation fighting against references to CAT in con-

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