Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics, Beth A. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 408 pp., $90 cloth, $29 paper.

This sophisticated, quantitative study of international human rights law in domestic politics finds that the ratification of such multilateral treaties as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women have had important positive consequences for human rights in many parts of the world. Progress has been made, writes Simmons, despite the fact that the agents who actually sign such agreements—states—cannot themselves be expected to perform reliably as enforcers of each other's stated commitments, whether due to disinterest in rights abuses abroad, competing foreign policy priorities, or the presumption that some other state's interest in policing human rights compliance will be sufficiently strong to save them the trouble. In other words, Simmons observes that human rights treaties often simply do not have what it takes to change international politics per se. Nevertheless, by examining the role of international law domestically, Simmons stakes out a clear path to a positive result and a potentially optimistic argument regarding the past and future of the “rights chances” of individuals everywhere.

The starting assumption of Simmons's “domestic politics model of treaty compliance” is that, in terms of the degree to which they care about human rights, no actors—not states, and not even the transnational advocacy networks that have been an important focus of much recent scholarship—can match the individual citizens and local activist groups potentially empowered by the strong signals and clear language supplied by human rights treaties. Simmons therefore explores a variety of mechanisms—agenda setting, litigation, and social mobilization—by which local citizens pressure domestic governments to take seriously their own international legal agreements.

The policy implications that follow include the notion of supporting these local stakeholders as they develop ways to demand, shape, and implement their international legal rights for themselves. Simmons encourages major powers and other international moral leaders to back up domestic rights activists by providing tangible and rhetorical support for the international human rights regime, including by ratifying the conventions that some (the United States, for instance) have yet to accept.