The Different Ways in Which Subnational Political Authorities Engage with International Human Rights Treaties

Engagement with human rights treaties occurs when the political authorities of a subnational unit try to understand an international treaty and intend to take policy measures to deal with it with a view to its (further) implementation. Our results indicate that there are three different ways in which political authorities engage with treaties: implementation-centred engagement, initiating engagement and embedded engagement. We base this typology on examples from our two case studies on the Istanbul Convention (IC) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), providing a granular understanding of what happens when subnational authorities commit to deal with a human rights treaty. At the end of this chapter, we discuss the conditions favouring and limiting the chances that the uses of treaties succeed in stimulating the engagement of political authorities and we offer a comparative outlook to distil similarities and differences in the patterns of engagement of subnational political authorities with the Istanbul Convention and the CRPD.