Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
The decisions of the UN’s political bodies would seem to represent the epitome of claims of double standards in the enforcement of international law. For even if we can accept that the members of the Security Council or the Human Rights Council (HRC) will choose to bring some situations to the attention of those bodies while leaving others off the agenda, or to pass some resolutions and reject others, such decisions seem quite suspect if we view those organizations as not merely making policy but enforcing international law. International lawyers have long identified this dilemma over enforcement: is it better to entrust the enforcement to international judges (e.g., the ICJ) or experts (e.g., the treaty bodies) who are more likely to treat like cases alike, but who lack the power to enforce their rulings (or whose decisions are not binding anyway); or to political bodies, who are more likely to pick favorites but whose rulings carry more bite vis-a-vis the target, either reputationally (because it comes from fellow states) or materially? Scholarly divides over this question are profound, with fans of international courts pitched against skeptics (like me) of judicial romanticism. My students love to debate this question because it has no obvious answer unless one thinks that the solution is a fantasy world in which states on the receiving end of criticism from expert bodies just start complying.
Recommended Citation
Ratner, Steven R. "Double Standards in UN Political Bodies: Is Impartiality Possible?" Afronomics Law (2025).
Comments
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that appropriate credit to the original author(s) is given. Originally published as Ratner, Steven R. "Double Standards in UN Political Bodies: Is Impartiality Possible?" Afronomics Law (2025).