| The international community has witnessed the gradual development of a complex system of international human rights laws during the past fifty-five years so that today mistreatment by a state of its citizens is no longer a purely domestic matter. Despite the increase in the number of international human rights treaties in legal force since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the rhetorical acceptance of many of the moral norms of human rights by at least three-fourths of the current nation-states, questions remain about the ability of the international community to ensure compliance with international human rights law. To determine those factors which influence the choice to use coercive foreign policy to enforce human rights laws, and the effectiveness of such approaches in improving the respect for personal integrity rights by those states targeted, this study uses a two-step Heckman analysis on the foreign policy practices of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1990 and 1994. Though the results suggest that non-governmental organizations might be one factor influencing the use of coercive policies to enforce human rights by these three Western states, and that when used such action generally targeted the worst state violators, coercive policies were rarely used by these three states. In the few cases where coercive pressure for human rights purposes was directed at a state violator, no improvement in the violations of personal integrity rights occurred within one year and in only two cases did some improvement occur within two years. |
