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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