Pleasing the Buyer: Human Rights Experts from Exporting Countries and Praise of Importing Countries

There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that despite international organizations’ efforts to moderate hierarchical relations, power relations shape their actions and policies. Research shows that international organizations’ human rights promotion actions have not escaped this pattern, and powerful countries can often bias policies in favor of their allies. Less research has examined whether weaker and poorer countries use international human rights work to please dominant partners. For such countries, attaining membership in the closed club of a specialized committee is not only a duty but also a resource and an opportunity. This article argues that countries that have successfully nominated a member to a committee of human rights experts will use this membership to gain favor with their exports’ target markets. The article further argues that to capture this dynamic the analysis must look at bilateral relations between countries with members in expert committees and countries under review. The article hypothesizes that the number of positive points in the reports that countries receive from the TB is positively associated with the level of exports from TB member’s home countries to the reviewed country. Dyadic analysis of new and previous data on three TB’s monitoring and TB members corroborates this hypothesis. The article draws theoretical conclusions regarding the link between economic power hierarchies and human rights promotion.