International courts lack traditional enforcement mechanisms. Scholars theorize that compliance with human rights rulings is therefore often driven by domestic processes, including political mobilization and parliamentary agenda setting. A necessary condition underlying these processes is attention to the rulings which is in part expected to be mediated by media attention. However, these conditions have not been explicitly addressed by the existing compliance literature. In this paper, we assess the impact of media attention to rulings by the European Court of the Human Rights on the likelihood of their implementation, using a novel dataset of case-specific news coverage. Exploiting exogenous variation in media attention caused by competing newsworthy events, we find that the probability of compliance increases, the more coverage a ruling receives. Our findings indicate that domestic news media play a key role for compliance with international courts.

中文翻译：

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媒体关注和遵守欧洲人权法院的规定


国际法院缺乏传统的执行机制。学者们认为，遵守人权裁决往往是由国内进程驱动的，包括政治动员和议会议程设定。这些过程背后的一个必要条件是对裁决的关注，这在一定程度上预计是通过媒体关注来调节的。然而，现有的合规文献尚未明确解决这些条件。在本文中，我们使用特定案例新闻报道的新颖数据集来评估媒体对欧洲人权法院裁决的关注对其执行可能性的影响。利用具有新闻价值的竞争事件引起的媒体关注度的外生变化，我们发现，裁决得到的报道越多，遵守的可能性就越大。我们的研究结果表明，国内新闻媒体在遵守国际法院规定方面发挥着关键作用。