Voting Patterns and Diversity of Backgrounds in the United Nations Human Rights Committee

Authors

Vera Shikhelman, University of Haifa and Hebrew University of JerusalemFollow

Publication Date

Spring 2025

First Page

649

Document Type

Article

Abstract

It is widely recognized that the decisions of judges are influenced to some extent by their backgrounds. In recent years this understanding gained traction in the international legal system, and there is an attempt to diversify the composition of international judicial institutions. This article explores empirically the question of whether the status of specific human rights in the home country of a judicial decision-maker influences their voting patterns in an international judicial institution. For instance, whether a decision-maker which comes from a country that promotes women’s rights would be more (or less) likely to promote women’s rights through his professional role in the international sphere? Or perhaps the opposite should be expected, and a decision-maker coming from a country with a problematic women’s rights record would be the one more willing to promote this right in the international sphere?

As a case study, I use United Nations Human Rights Committee (“HRC”). The HRC is the monitoring treaty body of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is one of the most important and highly regarded international human rights institutions. In order to test my hypothesis, I conduct a quantitative-empirical analysis of an original hand-coded dataset of the decisions of the HRC. In general, I find no strong evidence that the status of the rights in the committee member’s (“CM”) countries influences his or her voting patterns on those rights. However, the most noticeable exception to this is that CMs from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”) countries are more likely to vote in favor of countries in immigration and asylum cases. Also, CMs from OECD countries are more likely to vote in general in favor of countries. This might indicate that at times, the votes of CMs are influenced by their own life experience and perhaps reflect their roles as agents protecting the interests of their countries.

Repository Citation

Vera Shikhelman, Voting Patterns and Diversity of Backgrounds in the United Nations Human Rights Committee, 46 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. 649 (2025).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jil/vol46/iss3/2