Human rights defenders have an important role to play in ensuring that trade and trade rules promote and respect human rights. In this section, certain points should be taken into account to ensure that efforts to integrate human rights into trade agreements are successful. An increasing number of preferential trade agreements (EPZs) play an important role in the state`s respect for human rights. ATPs are more effective than more flexible human rights agreements in changing repressive behaviour when they provide strict standards that alter the essential benefits of integration to respect human rights principles. The PTA enhances the human rights of members through coercion by providing the instruments and resources needed to change the incentives of actors to promote reforms that would otherwise not be implemented. I develop three hypotheses: (1) The state`s commitment to NGOs and (2) to THE PTAs that provide flexible human rights standards (not related to market benefits) does not systematically improve human rights behaviour, while (3) the state`s commitment to THE PTAs, which provide strict human rights standards, , often produces better practices. I look at several cases to illustrate the processes of influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 countries between 1972 and 2002. I would like to thank Mike Colaresi, Dan Drezner, David Lake, Lisa Martin, Walter Mattli, John Meyer, Mark Pollack, Erik Voeten, Jim Vreeland and two anonymous critics for their detailed and thoughtful comments on different designs of this manuscript. , as well as the many people who helped me by asking me difficult questions along the way. I would also like to thank Michael Barnett, Charles Franklin and Jon Pevehouse for their advice during the thesis research that supports this article, and Alexander H. Montgomery for their help in data management. All mistakes are mine.
I thank the National Science Foundation (SES 2CDZ414 and SES 0135422), John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez for their generous support in data collection. I thank Nuffield College, Oxford University, for its support during the writing of the article, and especially Lynn Eden and the Stanford Centre for International Security and Cooperation. Think of the trade and partnership agreements used by the European Union. The prospect of EU membership, with all the economic benefits it entails, has greatly improved respect for human rights in candidate countries, such as Slovakia (then a candidate for membership) and Turkey. However, the Cotonou agreement and the previous Lomé conventions are more relevant to ACP countries.