Enforcers Within : Civil Society, Domestic Sanctions, and Compliance with International Agreements

The literature on international cooperation has explored in detail how international sanctions improve cooperation with international agreements. This holds in particular for trade agreements where economic sanctions can and sometimes are deployed. However, in non-trade areas, such as human rights, humanitarian, and environmental law, international sanctions are often lacking and scholars often claim this makes international law in these areas ineffective. But these blanket claims are hard to square with the great variation in compliance rates across countries and treaties that we observe: some states comply at fairly high levels even when international sanctions are non-existent, whilst others do not. In this paper I provide an explanation for this variation by exploring the role domestic sanctions play in fostering compliance. When treaties are properly implemented, domestic bureaucracies or courts are able to sanction actors for breaches to treaties. For instance, if a country ratifies and properly implements an environmental treaty, the state’s environmental agency will often monitor industries, and may fine or even close down companies that violate certain environmental standards set in place as the result of a treaty’s adoption. Generally, when states adopt treaties they implement them into their domestic legal system by passing legislation that will set in place domestic sanctions for violations of treaty standards. Yet, there is great variation in the level of domestic sanctions and enforcement: some countries impose strong domestic sanctions whilst others have weak sanctions or no sanctions at all. This paper presents a theory that explains why some states chose to create strong domestic sanctions whilst others do not, and argues that strong and enforceable domestic sanctions lead to higher compliance. The argument seeks to explain the variation in the strength of domestic sanctions as a result of domestic politics and institutions. To test implications of the theory, the paper uses original data on domestic sanctions for the Convention Against Torture to present large-n quantitative evidence for the argument. In addition, a case study of the Convention will provide qualitative evidence. The role of domestic sanctions remains understudied in the literature and this paper seeks to contribute to the international law literature by exploring the role that domestic sanctions play in explaining variation in compliance with treaties