CYIL Vol. 7, 2016

CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ INTERNATIONAL HUMANRIGHTS OBLIGATIONS OF POSTǧCOMMUNIST COUNTRIES various types of international human rights treaties, the nature of human rights in question and the political orientation of the governments which sign and ratify the human rights treaties. On the basis of the collected data, they found out e.g. that there is no direct proportion between the quality of observance of human rights and the number of signed and ratified human rights treaties. Even countries with democratic and human rights deficiencies do not hesitate to ratify such treaties quite frequently (pp. 22-23). That makes you wonder why states really participate in international human rights systems. The authors of the first chapter come up with several factors impacting the decision of a state to join a treaty. They divide them into internal ones (sending a message to the population of a country, the nature of a political system) and external ones. They further categorize the external factors into indirect ones (e.g. increasing the reputation of a country in international relations) and direct ones (e.g. increasing the chance of a country to enter the EU, to put an end to international sanctions etc.). They also emphasize the importance of the very treaty, its substantive content and its control mechanism (pp. 23-24). But it gets interesting when the data come in. It does not come as a surprise that in the process of democratization, the Czechoslovak federation tried to join international human rights treaties as fast as possible. The goal was to get integrated into the Western world in terms of its values. It was historically interesting to learn, on the other hand, that it took a long time for socialist Czechoslovakia to ratify signed treaties. This is surprising, as the authors say, because, due to the lack of opposition, undemocratic states usually join a human rights treaty quickly if they really decide to do so (p. 26). When it comes to the Czech Republic and its “human rights shape” we learn that Czech Republic ratified several human rights treaties as one of the first countries, and several others as one of the last countries. It is simply not consistent in this regard. But if the Czech Republic decides to ratify a certain treaty, it usually does so pretty quickly in comparison to other EU member states. On the other hand, the Czech Republic never signed certain treaties that have been already signed by a significant number of EU member states (p. 28). You may be thinking that this all clear and that this information does not have much of value. I do not think so. The data presented by all the authors tell you a lot about how seriously we really do take human rights treaties. We cannot just assume that. Thanks to the research in the reviewed book we now know. The first part of the book also analyzes reservations to international human rights treaties. At the end of the first chapter you may find empirical data in relation to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And the third chapter provides thorough theoretical analysis on the application of reservations in international human rights law. I found one of the empirically proven conclusions pretty striking. If you are a liberal, you would think that democratic states do not generally resort to a reservation to

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