No one is held accountable – it is impossible to enforce I-Law violations

Many norms of international law, especially international human rights law, are widely violated. The international legal system as a whole may suffer as result.

International human rights law has changed international law. The two primary sources of international legal obligations—treaties and custom—have become more expansive and looser so as to bring more human rights norms into the ambit of international law, despite wide-spread non-compliance with those norms. In one sense, the success of the effort is clear: international law now regulates a vast array of human-rights-related conduct. Whether the expansion is an effective way to promote human rights is widely-debated.

The broader, unacknowledged problem, however, is the potential effect of the expansion on international law as a whole, as I discuss in detail here. Today, international law includes a broad range of human rights norms which are routinely violated, from the U.N. reporting requirements to gross violations of human dignity. Wide-spread violations of some legal norms may, in turn, make it harder to enforce others. As a (very) imperfect analogy, consider the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention: widespread violations of human rights law may be a symbol of unaccountability, a signal that no one cares about violations of international law and that no one is in charge. Accountability is a fundamental concern of public international law because the system lacks a centralized enforcement mechanism. Whatever the merits of the “broken windows” argument in the context of domestic law enforcement, behavior which signals a lack of accountability may be especially damaging to international law writ large.