Trading Human Rights: How Preferential Trade Agreements Influence

Government Repression
He, Adel John P. 11901470

1.) Short Profile of Authors

Emilie Hafner-Burton is the current UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy
professor. She is also the research director of Future of Democracy and the director of
the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at Global Policy and Strategy. She
has published various papers on corruption, social network analysis, behavioral
economics, and economics sanction.
2.) Article Summary
PTAs are agreements that are designed to reduce barriers to trade between countries
and would also often include provisions for human rights. However, the relationship
between PTAs and government repression is yet to be understood. In the paper by
Hafner-Burton, she argues that PTAs could influence government repression through
coercion. Coercion is defined as the use of material benefits and institutional structures
to either reward or punish certain behaviors. Hafner-Burton also argues that PTAs could
be effective in reducing human rights abuse if they provide hard human rights standards,
which are ultimately tied to market benefits. An example of hard human rights standards
with market benefits will include economic sanctioning of trading countries if they ever
violated a human rights standard. The reason why this could be so effective,
Hafner-Burton argues, is that hard human rights standards provide the government with
a clear incentive to comply with human rights norms.

3.) Key Findings and Recommendations

The most important key finding in this paper is that PTAs are effective at influencing
government repression through coercion by means of hard human rights standards. It is
more effective at reducing repression compared to soft human rights standards.
However, PTAs aren’t bulletproof. PTAs are more effective when they are negotiated and
implemented by countries that take human rights seriously and are also supported by
strong domestic and international institutions that could enforce compliance with human
rights standards. The author also briefly mentioned that, while PTAs are effective in
enforcing compliance, it is not the most ideal form of human rights governance. She
 argues that there are possible better ways in going about enforcing human rights
standards. An example of this would be better-structured human rights agreements.

4.) Individual Critique

Although this paper has provided valuable insight into the topic of human rights, there
are certain aspects in which this paper could improve upon. First, the author could opt to
include qualitative methodology in addition to the quantitative methodology that she has
utilized as the latter method lacks the ability to capture the nuances of human rights.
One way in which the author could have performed the qualitative method is to conduct
interviews with the citizens, human rights activists, and officials, as an example. Another
thing that the author has failed to consider is the unintended consequences. As an
economist student, one of the dilemmas of making a decision is to consider the moral
implication of a policy because for most people, they’d only consider the short-term
consequence of an act. One unintended consequence of PTAs is that they could
increase inequality by favoring big businesses while damaging small businesses and
workers.