Shaping the Uses of a Treaty Through Ratification and Implementation Procedures

After being signed by a state, international human rights treaties must be formally ratified and then implemented. What happens before and during the ratification may influence the future uses of—and engagements with—human rights treaties and different mechanisms are employed to try to spur engagement and implementation. Through case studies of the Istanbul Convention and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, we demonstrate, first, how a government may try to shape the preferences of its subnational units through the pre-ratification procedure. Second, we show how federal, inter-cantonal and cantonal actors employ or develop ‘domestic implementation mechanisms’ to orient the engagement of subnational units. While these mechanisms sometimes stem from the federal or inter-cantonal level, they can also arise from actions taken at the subnational level, unfolding in a bottom-up process.