Carceral moderation and the Janus face of international pressure 39 enthusiasm or reluctantly with delay. Thus, in his study of the historical trajectories of various international prohibition regimes (e.g., tackling slavery, piracy, and alcohol), Nadelmann [2] posits that their fate was ultimately determined by great power support (or lack thereof). As regards specifically the international human rights regime, Krasner [3] similarly argues that pressures for compliance stemming from the international arena are only likely to find success in instances in which compliance is also in the interest of a global hegemon. As a rule, moreover, states are known to be wary of entering into international commitments such as human rights conventions and related obligations that risk exposing them to unwanted scrutiny and criticism [4]. The expansion of the international human rights regime over successive decades – both in terms of membership and scope of activity – appears to pose a conundrum for approaches that privilege the role of stronger actors in explaining the status of international rules and norms. Since the early 2000s alone, through the development of the International Criminal Court, a new model of criminal accountability has emerged to hold individuals responsible for human rights violations, whilst a new international human rights norm has also been heralded: the responsibility of the international community to intervene in cases where citizens’ own states are unwilling or unable to protect them from gross human rights violations (known as ‘Responsibility to Protect’, or ‘R2P’) [5]. Within Europe, which has been regarded as something of a hot-spot of international human rights promotion and compliance by global comparison, there are today more human rights treaties, more human rights organisations, more human rights commissioners and more human rights prizes, than ever before [6]. But how is it that the international human rights regime has seen successive growth without the full support of key international powers, such as the US, Russia and China, above and beyond the broader opposition that has arisen internationally to the human rights agenda over the last decade or so [4]? How is it, equally, that within Europe the human rights regime has appeared to reach unprecedented heights at the same time that strong states such as Britain and France have challenged its reach, and human rights rules and norms are increasingly met with either indifference or hostility [7]? And how is it that in recent years, in both global and regional arenas, human rights rules and norms have continued to develop at the same time that countries with poor human rights records have been made chairs of key committees in international bodies [7, 8]?2 Variation in compliance with the international human rights regime also needs to be accounted for, particularly since the regime has generally lacked the type of hard enforcement mechanisms that accompany other types of international legal regimes [9]. Comparative studies have shown that substantial disparity exists between the compliance records of states towards international human rights rules and norms (see, e.g., [10]). International human rights rules and norms, meanwhile, are not entirely without enforcement mechanisms; economic sanctions and monetary fines, for 2 In 2011, for example, an Azerbaijani representative who consistently praised Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev as well as prison conditions in that country, despite NGO criticisms of its human rights abuses and imprisonment of political opponents in particular, was elected president of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture [7]. Similarly, in 2015, Saudi Arabia’s representative to the UNHCR was made chair of the five-member Consultative Group that appoints independent human rights experts as ‘Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council’ (see further [8]), despite widespread criticism of the Kingdom’s human rights record, including a rising number of judicial executions.