Why do States comply with human rights? Investigating the reasons and addressing paradoxes.

Abstract

This dissertation tries to investigate the reasons why States decide to accept and to comply with international human rights. Their choice is not always easy, nor straightforward. On the one hand, States that comply with human rights are aware that they must acknowledge the fact that there exist both internal and external actors, as well as mere circumstances, that can change or make their decisional process more difficult than expected. On the other hand, States cannot ignore the existence of those actors and circumstances, otherwise they may incur further problems. By taking into consideration the current situation, it appears clear that the number of complying States has sensibly grown in the last decades, thus totally subverting the circumstances of the first half of the 20th century, in which human rights did not play a relevant role at all. Despite this, it can be observed that there still exist some controversial situations that need to be carefully addressed in the light of this progress in terms of compliance. One of those is represented by the United States of America, which is one of the greatest democracies in the world, but at the same time is still showing a paradoxical approach towards the issue of torture, of which the example of Guantanamo Bay probably represents one of the most famous cases.