Doctoral Dissertation Research: Defining and Evaluating States' Obligations to Eliminate Racial Discrimination

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This project will analyze how accountability procedures of the United Nations human rights treaty system are carried out in practice. Even those states that cooperate with accountability requirements never fully meet their treaty obligations. By studying three groups of Costa Rican government officials and a UN expert committee as each formally evaluates progress towards implementing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the researcher will be able to compare responsible parties? interpretations of obligations within the Convention?s broad norms.By engaging in direct observation, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, the researcher will investigate how officials within a country use census data, other government records, and public consultations to construct a report on discrimination against indigenous, Afro-Costa Rican, and immigrant populations. The researcher will also observe the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination as it evaluates such state reports. The study will analyze these Costa Rican and UN officials? deliberations over questions of evidence and treaty interpretation, focusing in particular on how they understand the scope of the term ?discrimination,? and the bounds of states? responsibilities to combat it.Findings from this project will contribute to practical knowledge of treaty implementation processes. Existing macro-level analyses of human rights treaties attribute unfulfilled obligations to weak enforcement and uncooperative states. By analyzing the process at a different level, this project will open the way toward explanations based in norm ambiguity and interpretation. Its novel approach will generate findings that are valuable to ongoing efforts to improve the human rights treaty accountability system. This project will also support the training of a social scientist.