Human Rights Reporting as a Policy Tool: An Examination of the State Department Country Reports

Neufville, Judith Innes de

doi:10.2307/762198

Cited by 46 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…9 Keck and Sikkink (1998) attribute this change to an "information paradox." Moreover, Innes de Neufville (1986) argues that the quality of the human rights reports produced by the U.S. State Department increased because of changes to the reporting requirements, which "altered practices and norms within the Department of State and created an arena for public evaluation of the information" (682). Clark and Sikkink (2013) coin a similar term-"human rights information paradox"-to describe this issue as it relates to human rights abuses specifically.…”

Section: Why the Standard Of Accountability Changes Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result of this paradox, the global human rights situation may appear to have worsened over time because there is simply an increasing amount of information with which to assess human rights practices. Moreover, Innes de Neufville (1986) argues that the quality of the human rights reports produced by the U.S. State Department increased because of changes to the reporting requirements, which “altered practices and norms within the Department of State and created an arena for public evaluation of the information” (682). Improvements in the reports are corroborated by yearly critiques published by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and a quantitative analysis by Poe, Carey and Vazquez (2001).…”

Section: Why the Standard Of Accountability Changes Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

2014

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A ccording to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.Notes: Proportions closer to 1 indicate that the dynamic standard model outperforms the constant standard model at predicting the original repression variables. Proportions closer to 0 indicate the opposite. Proportions at 0.50 indicate that both models are predicting the items with about the same amount of error relative to each other. The dynamic standard model does a much better job of predicting the original repression variables, especially the event-based variables.

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Section: Why the Standard Of Accountability Changes Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why the Standard Of Accountability Changes Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

2014

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“…Human rights monitoring reports form a core part of the contemporary international human rights regime. While country reports published by international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are highlighted as important examples of “naming and shaming” (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Ron et al 2005), government reports also play an important role, as sources of authoritative information, tools to pressure governments, and focal points for advocacy (De Neufville 1986; Apodaca 2006; Sikkink 2007).…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The US State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices are the most widely recognized case of government human rights monitoring, and have been published on nearly every country annually since the mid-1970s. Their roots lie in Congressional requirements of human rights criteria for foreign aid, which evolved in 1976 into a requirement that annual reports be submitted to Congress on the human rights practices of any country proposed for security assistance, and soon expanded to all UN member countries (De Neufville 1986, 684).…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring: Evidence from Structural Topic Models of US State Department Human Rights Reports

Bagozzi¹,

Berliner²

2016

PSRM

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Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts and assessing the effects of covariates on these dimensions. We apply STMs to a corpus of 6298 State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (1977–2012), identifying a plausible set of topics including killings and disappearances, freedoms of expression and movement, and labor rights, among others. We find that these topics vary markedly both over time and space. We also find that while US domestic politics play no systematic role in shaping topic prevalence, US allies tend to receive more attention to violations of physical integrity rights. These results challenge extant research, and illustrate the usefulness of STM methods for future study of foreign policy documents. Our findings also highlight the importance of topical attention shifts in documents that monitor and evaluate countries.

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“…Furthermore, the same human rights experts that argue HA was tamed under Reagan also acknowledged that the quality of the annual human rights reports significantly improved with each passing year of the administration. Indeed, statistical tests comparing the State Department's human rights reports with those of Amnesty International and Freedom House found a high degree of correlation (Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985;Innes de Neufville 1986).…”

Section: The Peace Corpsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideas, Bureaucratic Politics, and the Crafting of Foreign Policy

Drezner¹

2000

American Journal of Political Science

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Human Rights Reporting as a Policy Tool: An Examination of the State Department Country Reports

Cited by 46 publications

References 0 publications

Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring: Evidence from Structural Topic Models of US State Department Human Rights Reports

Ideas, Bureaucratic Politics, and the Crafting of Foreign Policy

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