Socialisation by Inquiry: A Study of the Effectiveness and Impact of Human Rights Council-Mandated Commissions of Inquiry in Israel and Palestine

Over the last three decades, the United Nations has dispatched an increasing number of international inquiry mechanisms in response to allegations of human rights and humanitarian law violations. International commissions of inquiry, originally deployed to settle inter-state disputes, have now been fully adopted by the United Nations human rights machinery as tools of preventive diplomacy and to facilitate accountability for human rights and humanitarian law violations. Professional and scholarly debates about their purposes, role, mode of operation and contribution to the development of international law abound, but only a handful of studies have considered their impact on targeted actors. This study seeks to identify what domestic institutional, legislative, jurisprudential and policy change occurred as a result of international inquiry processes commissioned by the Human Rights Council in Israel and Palestine. The empirical analysis of the effectiveness and impact of five Council-mandated commissions of inquiry hinges on an innovative understanding of international commissions of inquiry as agents of state socialisation. By applying theories on procedural legitimacy, coercion, persuasion and acculturation to the sampled inquiry processes, this study seeks both to determine their discrete causal contribution to the changes considered and to identify what micro-processes these inquiries were able to set in motion to elicit such change. In order to establish a seamless chain of causation, this study applies process-tracing and the congruence method to analyse data gathered through official documents and governmental positions, interviews, case law and newspapers. The analysis shows that the agency of international commissions of inquiry unfolds within specific domestic and supranational contexts on which they are largely dependent. Their chances of success rest on their ability to leverage specific arguments and to strategically mobilise other actors. While these observations are context-specific, it is possible to distil from them a number of proposals for reform.