Domestic Politics and International Human Rights Tribunals

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.1. Human rights tribunals and the challenge of compliance; 2. Explaining compliance with human rights tribunals; 3. Domestic institutions and patterns of compliance; 4. Compliance as a signal of states' human rights commitments: Uribe's Colombia; 5. Leveraging international law's legitimacy to change policies: compliance and domestic policy promotion in Argentina and Portugal; 6. The bitter pill of compliance: preferences for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law; 7. Compliance failures: Russia, Italy and Brazil and the politics of non-compliance; 8. Conclusion: the European and inter-American courts in context.