The United Nations international covenant on civil and political rights: Does it make a difference in human rights behavior?

Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progresse d to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member stares are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joini ng the UN. Of the newly independent stares in Eastern Europe and in the reg ion of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and M acedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a parry to this international treaty land its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state parry's actual behavior. The hypothes is is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) an d across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bi variate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences bet ween the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-parry states. H owever, this difference does not appear in the bivariate analysis that comp ares the stares parties' behavior before becoming a parry to the treaty wit h their behavior after becoming a party stare. When the analysis progresses to more sophisticated multivariate analysis, in which factors known to aff ect human rights are controlled, the impact of the covenant and its optiona l protocol disappears altogether. Overall, this study suggests that it may be overly optimistic to expect that being a party to this international cov enant will produce an observable direct impact.