Sonia Cardenas NHRI Vol [CUP]（索尼娅Cardenas NHRI卷(杯)）.pdfVIP

State Compliance and National Human Rights Institutions Sonia Cardenas One of the purposes of any institution is to routinize compliance with a given set of rules, making it more likely that the rules will be followed regardless of changing circumstances or 1 turnovers in leadership. National human rights institutions (NHRIs), most often depicted as a bridge between international norms and local implementation, are in principle designed to assure 2 the state’s compliance with its international legal obligations. Obviously diverse, NHRIs are charged most often with promoting and protecting international human rights norms domestically. Even if an NHRI does not always advance the state’s compliance, NHRIs— whether through independent activism, cooperation or collusion with the state, or seemingly innocuous promotive work—can alter the human rights landscape domestically. For good or ill, incrementally or dramatically, their incorporation into national human rights struggles cannot be ignored. NHRIs, then, are not a passing fad. Even when they reflect simple window dressing, or attempts to appease international critics, their existence still is consequential. NHRIs signal the entry of the modern-bureaucratic state into the domestic human rights arena—institutionalizing 1 James G. March and Johan P. Olson, ‘Elaborating the ‘New Institutionalism,’ in R.A.W. Rhodes, et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (Oxford 2006). 2 See especially Anne Gallagher, ‘Making Human Rights Treaty Obligations a Reality: Working with New Actors Monitoring and Partners’, in