Initially, the work mostly focused on an empirical study of 12,000 cases of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to determine the compliance practices of states and their link to different remedies. The results revealed that remedies have little impact on whether compliance takes place or how quick it is. For example, the quantum of damages that a state has to pay does not affect how quickly the compensation is paid. Compliance is therefore unaffected by quantum. Although there are differences between different remedies (eg legislation takes longer to adopt than payment of compensation or other practical measures), our results show that remedies - whether monetary or non-monetary - do not act as incentives on states. This is partly also because the Court plays a conservative role and rarely specifies reparations, instead it is states themselves that choose which remedial measures they intend to adopt. As a consequence, states often propose the full menu of remedies and there is little to distinguish one case from another in this respect.
Moving beyond remedies, the project also studied the role of different actors in the compliance process at the state level. We produced country reports for several states in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia and undertook a social network analysis to understand which actors play a role in compliance. These range from executive, judicial, legislative, nongovernmental, and other actors and their role is different depending on the subject matter of the case, but also whether the case ends up closed (complied with) or not. For example, in most of our networks, non-governmental organisations only become engaged on compliance questions when the traditional organs of state - administrative and executive - fail to undertake the required steps to compliance. More broadly, we tested the structures of compliance networks - whether these were decentralised or centralised, ie with a specific organ coordinating compliance across the state. We found that although often very efficient, centralised networks are vulnerable to capture by autocratic leaders. In these cases, when the central organ is disabled, compliance as a process can collapse.
Finally, our computer simulation sought to understand whether peer pressure plays a role in the Council of Europe. In our model, we investigated how states learn from one another within the Council of Europe, how they imitate each other, and what this means for the compliance within the system. Our first finding was that negative - non-compliant behaviour is more contagious than compliant behaviour and that the system veers towards non-compliance or compliance minimalism. As a consequence, we tested different interventions that would act preventatively. In this respect, we found, for example, that the role of the Department of Execution plays a crucial role in maintaining high expectations of states in the monitoring process, in issuing regular recommendations with best practice examples. In contrast to general recommendations, high connectivity between states does not lead to better human rights protection across the system. Instead, we found that states could benefit enormously from close mentoring state-to-state relationships, where they could learn from states who are better at compliance.
