Emerging Global Actors: The United Nations and National Human Rights Institutions

There is a new and significant development in field of human rights: U.N. led proliferation of national human rights institutions (NHRIs). NHRIs are government agencies whose purported aim is to implement international norms domestically. These institutions have expanded considerably since early 1990s, quadrupling in number and appearing in almost 100 countries. What explains diffusion of such similar institutions across diverse national contexts? In this article, I argue that entry of this actor onto world stage cannot be understood without examining role of international organizations, especially United Nations. Whereas international support for NHRIs in past merely defined appropriate institutional structures and functions, today international actors are directly engaged in creating and strengthening these institutions. Support from UN and other international organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental alike, has allowed NHRIs to take unprecedented step of forging transgovernmental alliances and to even begin acquiring formal international standing. While students of international relations have overlooked these developments, NHRIs do signal an important innovation in global governance. (1) The emergence of these institutions marks a potentially significant step in implementation of international human rights law. In words of Canadian government, NHRIs may be the practical link between international standards and their concrete application, bridge between ideal and its implementation. (2) Given this transformative agenda, we need a much better understanding of how international actors like UN, which has been at forefront of these human rights activities, actually engage in national institution building. (3) At same time, as long as states remain principal makers and breakers of international law, support for NHRIs may be a doubleedged phenomenon, presenting both opportunities and challenges for local protection of human rights norms. In addressing these trends, I advance two sets of arguments. First, I contend that, contrary to conventional state-centric expectations, UN has played a crucial role in creating and strengthening NHRIs. It has done so by means of four mechanisms: standard setting, capacity building, network facilitating, and membership granting. I provide support for this general proposition by tracing UN support historically, presenting descriptive statistics, and using counterfactual reasoning. Other actors--including government agencies, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations like Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)--have contributed to these activities, especialty in terms of capacity building; but only UN has been equipped to coordinate and legitimate global diffusion of these national institutions. Second, drawing on nascent experience of NHRIs, I propose that, while creation of NHRIs is a welcome development, insofar as it serve s to embed international norms in local structures, it also can have perverse consequences. National human rights institutions can have unintended effect of heightening social expectations, which governments are then unwilling or unable to meet; in some instances, this could lead to less rather than more human rights protection. Although I structure article around these two central arguments, in an introductory section I survey functions and relevance of emerging NHRIs, namely their role in implementing international norms domestically. In remainder of article I focus on interplay between UN and national institutions. Domestic Implementation of International Norms The stated objective of all governmental human rights institutions is to implement international norms domestically. Put differently, NHRJs are intended to be permanent, local infrastructure upon which international human rights norms are built; they are not to be confused with ad hoc truth commissions or other temporary crisis-driven institutional arrangements. …

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