ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of treaty ratification on human rights outcomes. International human rights improve where people have both the motive and the means to voice their demands, and the argument is simply that ratified human rights treaties help them do that. The 1990s were strangely disappointing for international human rights. In the early 2000s, new bodies of evidence could be tapped to explore this claim that ratified treaties have an important mobilizing role domestically. In the early 1980s, the landmark Political Terror Scale began collecting and systematising data from the United States Department of State Human Rights Reports to create a scale of human rights violations. Some of the most insistent scepticism regarding the quantitative evidence and its interpretation has come from law scholars who evince a general scepticism about quantitative methods.
