Time and Compliance with International Rulings: The Case of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Abstract

Most studies of international courts analyze state compliance with court rulings by looking at the status of legal cases at a particular point in time. This “snapshot” approach ignores two important features of the compliance process. First, states often take a long time to comply with court rulings. Therefore, we need metrics that reflect not only if, but also when, states satisfy court rulings. Second, the conditions that facilitate or hinder compliance change over time. To accommodate these analytic challenges, we introduce the concept of expected time to compliance (ETC), and show how to estimate this metric using discrete-time survival models. We illustrate the advantages of this approach with an analysis of all cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights between 1989 and 2018.

Keywords: human rights, compliance, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, ius constitutionale commune, statistical models, expected time to compliance