States living in glasshouses …: Why fighting domestic insurgency changes how countries vote in the UN human rights council

Abstract

How do conflicts within a country's borders affect its behavior beyond them? We argue that fighting insurgencies at home shapes a country's human rights posture at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). States often suppress insurgencies using methods that violate their international human rights commitments. They are therefore hesitant to condemn other countries’ alleged violations for fear of reciprocal condemnation of their own actions. This is especially true in countries with greater media freedom where the media is more likely to hold the state accountable for human rights violations, and to highlight its apparent hypocrisy internationally. Such states, we argue, are more likely to vote against or abstain from resolutions that target individual states for human rights transgressions. We test this claim with a global statistical analysis of country voting patterns at the UNHRC from 1973 to 2017. Our results yield new insights into the determinants of countries’ voting behavior in multilateral human rights fora.