Determinants of Compliance Difficulties among ‘Good Compliers’: Implementation of International Human Rights Rulings in the Czech Republic

The aim of this article is to explore factors that account forcompliance difficulties that may eventually result in avariable level of implementation of the rulings of the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights and the United Nations Human RightsCommittee. We do so by focusing on the high-cost rulingsrequiring complex legislative measures rendered against theCzech Republic, which ranks among the best compliers amongCentral and Eastern European countries as well as overall. Ourstudy shows that the level of compliance achieved depends on arepeated balancing exercise, in which domestic political actorsbalance domestic political costs of compliance againstinternational reputational costs of non-compliance.Subsequently, we argue that the lapse of time is critical inunderstanding the compliance processes as, sometimes, even ashort moment of time, when domestic political costs ofcompliance become lower than international reputational costsof non-compliance, may create a ‘window of opportunity’ foradopting legislation that is necessary for implementing thegiven rulings of international human rights bodies.Pro-compliance actors then have to take full advantage of such‘windows of opportunity’. If they fail to do so, this windowmay close for a long time, if not forever.