Why do consolidated democracies incorporate international human rights law (IHRL) treaties into national law? Existing research suggests contrastive accounts of the participation of democracies in IHRL regimes. While overall more likely to ratify, consolidated democracies are sometimes reluctant to accept demanding human rights commitments and less likely than both newly democratic and authoritarian regimes to incorporate international law in their constitutions. To theorize why established democracies commit to IHRL, this paper provides a comparative process tracing of the decisions to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into national law in Denmark and Sweden in the early 1990s. Why did these solid democracies with an exceptional commitment to human rights wait over 40 years to give domestic effect to a treaty they had helped create? Assessing rival theories of state commitment to human rights norms, the findings suggest that contextual developments in European law provided an opportunity for domestic political elites to seek insurance by incorporating the ECHR to place constraints on executive power. The argument qualifies claims about material strategizing or socialization to European norms as the primary drivers of incorporation.

中文翻译：

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为什么要纳入欧洲人权法院？人权承诺的国内激励因素

为什么巩固的民主国家要将国际人权法（IHRL）条约纳入国内法？现有研究对民主国家参与国际人权法制度提出了对比性的描述。虽然总体上更有可能批准，但巩固的民主国家有时不愿意接受要求严格的人权承诺，并且比新民主和威权政权更不可能将国际法纳入其宪法。为了理论化为什么成熟的民主国家致力于国际人权法，本文对 20 世纪 90 年代初丹麦和瑞典将《欧洲人权公约》(ECHR) 纳入国内法的决定进行了比较过程追踪。为什么这些对人权作出特殊承诺的坚实民主国家要等 40 多年才让它们帮助制定的条约在国内生效？在评估国家对人权规范承诺的竞争理论时，研究结果表明，欧洲法律的背景发展为国内政治精英提供了机会，通过纳入《欧洲人权公约》对行政权力施加限制来寻求保险。该论点将有关物质战略或社会化符合欧洲规范的主张视为合并的主要驱动力。