Over 30 years ago, Rosalind Higgins, the first female ever to be appointed to the International Court of Justice, wrote, “There is now a legal yardstick against which the behavior of states may be judged and a point of reference for the individual in the assertion of his claims.” The creation of an international legal regime for human rights was one of the most ambitious multilateral projects of the twentieth century. Yet, it is a project whose full significance is hard to appreciate. It is difficult in the first instance to understand why this branch of international law exists at all. What could states ever hope to gain by acceding to an international “legal yardstick” for internal behavior? For many people, it is also difficult to see how a set of rules with weak international enforcement provisions could possibly make much impact on the world. Without sanctions for those countries that do not measure up, it is not obvious how governments can be influenced to take human rights standards seriously.

This study was motivated to shed light on the existence and influence of the international legal regime for human rights that has developed over the past 60 years, even if, as Michael Ignatieff has noted, we can never answer this question definitively. The effort is nonetheless an important one.