Description
What is the language of effective human rights argumentation? When challenging a state’s human rights practices, actors can draw on a range of discursive options from the ethical to the political and legal. Current research on human rights argumentations highlights how rhetoric is used by actors to create political outcomes, emphasizing the role of human rights language on a case-by-case basis. However, little scholarship to date has relied on quantitative methodology to systematically analyze the role of legal claims, and their resulting acceptance or rejection, in global human rights argumentation. However, little scholarship to date has analyzed the role of legal claims in human rights argumentation on a quantitative and global scale. This study uses data on all recommendations made at the first two cycles of the Universal Periodic Review, a mechanism by which all UN member states are reviewed regularly on their human rights practices. Using an original coding of legal and nonlegal recommendations, this paper tests the hypothesis that legal claims will have the greatest likelihood of acceptance by a state under review compared to nonlegal claims, emphasizing the role of rhetoric in international relations and the use of law in human rights discourses.
