Chapter 3: The Regime

The global human rights regime’s (GHRR’s) overarching purpose, or mission, is to advocate for and promote, both in principle (ideationally; ideally) and in practice (in reality), the spread (see: Pegram, 2010) and strengthening of human rights provisions by fostering political commitment to and investment in these provisions (see: ILO, 02 November 2023), and through enhancing multilateral cooperation (see: ibid.; see also: Cardenas, 2003).

Tom Pegram (Director, Global Governance Institute, University College London) has argued:

For Pegram, the UN-centred GHRR is ‘a supranational regime’ (ibid., p. 2), and as such has ‘inherent limitations’, these being how it ‘lacks the necessary apparatus to enforce the ambitious governance objective of regulating domestic [nation-]state behaviour’ (ibid., p. 2; see also: Moravcsik, 2000) ^[3.1]. The GHRR’s limitations account for the ‘persistent disjuncture between human rights standards and [human rights] practice in many domestic [geo-political] jurisdictions’ (ibid., p. 1), in particular at the nation-state level. There is, in other words, a ‘compliance gap’ which is ‘undermining the aspirational claim of universal human rights’ (ibid., p. 1), and which for some observers means that ‘global human rights governance is failing’ (see: Mchangama & Verdirame, 2013), especially where human rights treaty commitments are needed the most (see: Hafner-Burton, 2013). Some writers see ‘persistent violating behaviour as indicative of systemic design flaws’ in the GHRR ‘which leave “false positives” unaccountable’, these false positives being nation-states that commit themselves to human-rights treaties but with ‘no intention of complying’ (Pegram, op. cit., p. 2; see also: Simmons, 2009).