Source: Kathryn Sikkink, "The Power of Principled Ideas: Human Rights Policies in the United States and Western Europe," in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein, and Robert O. Keohane, (Cornell University Press, 1993), p.140.
It is not difficult to see that states like China and Russia very often belong in field IV. The US after the end of the Cold War has moved more towards field I and III, but still chooses to remain in field II on matters like convention setting up International Criminal Court. That the US, Russia, and China should appear on the fight hand side of the table seems very interesting. This can partly be explained as the "big three" rule, as I will set out in section 5, but Andrew Moravcsik also offers a very interesting explanation.
Moravscik describes the distinctiveness of international human rights regimes, as compared to other international institutions governing trade, monetary, environmental, or security policy, as a regime not designed primarily to regulate policy externalities arising from societal interactions across borders, but to hold governments accountable for purely internal activities. Human rights regimes are not generally enforced by interstate action. Instead, they empower individual citizens to bring suit to challenge domestic activities of their own government (obviously, here Moravscik speaks only of multilateral institutions). Moravcsik examines the establishment of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) during the years 1949-1950, and finds that established democracies (continuous democracy since a date before 1920: Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, UK, Luxembourg) often allied with dictatorships and transitional regimes (Greece, Turkey) in opposition to reciprocally binding human rights enforcements. The primary proponents of reciprocally binding obligations were the governments of newly established democracies (continuous democracy only since a date between 1920 and 1950: Austria, France, Italy, Iceland, Ireland, Germany).
