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International lawyers for the most part assume that, as Louis Henkin memorably put it, "almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time."1 This assumption undergirds the work of many legal scholars and practitioners, who endeavor to explicate and form the law presumably because they believe that it has real impact. Indeed, the claim that international law matters was until recently so widely accepted among international lawyers that there have been relatively few efforts to examine its accuracy.2 Yet this view long coexisted with a much more skeptical conception of international law among international relations scholars-a conception that holds that, in the immortal words of Thucydides, "[t]he
strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,"3 with little regard for international law.4
The disinclination of international lawyers to confront the efficacy of international law is nowhere more evident-or more problematic-than in the field of human rights law. After all, the major engines of compliance that exist in other areas of international law are for the most part absent in the area of human rights. Unlike the public international law of money, there are no "competitive market forces" that press for compliance.5 And, unlike in the case of trade agreements, the costs of retaliatory noncompliance are low to nonexistent, because a nation's actions against its own citizens do not directly threaten or harm other states. Human rights law thus stands out as an area of international law in which countries have little incentive to police noncompliance with treaties or norms. As Henkin remarked, "The forces that induce compliance with other law ... do not pertain equally to the law of human rights."6
Are human rights treaties complied with? Are they effective in changing states' behavior for the better? These are critical questions not only for our assessment of human rights treaties, but also for our understanding of the effects of international law more generally. If states act primarily in pursuit of their self-interest, as dominant theories of international relations generally assume, a finding that human rights law frequently alters state behavior would be deeply puzzling, for human rights treaties impinge on core areas of national sovereignty without promising obvious material or...