UCLA students assist EIN in effort to develop future implementation-support strategies

This past year, the European Implementation Network (EIN) cooperated with the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in an effort to help the Network explore future strategies and plans in support of the implementation of judgments of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

Four UCLA students completing the degree of Masters of Public Policy (MPP) – Paola Perez, Hillary Smith, Siyuan Meng and Daniel Coltellaro – worked with EIN to develop an initial system to quickly rank and compare ECtHR judgments still pending full implementation. The main approach taken by the students was to find a system that could potentially allow EIN to prioritize its future work with the assistance of enhanced evaluation measurements.

The four students involved in the study. From left to right: Paola Perez, Hillary Smith, Siyuan Meng and Daniel Coltellaro. 

This project was completed as part of the Luskin School’s Applied Policy Project. In their final year of study, students work in teams with a real world client to provide recommendations on addressing relevant policy issues. These topics may range from criminal justice reform to environmental protection policy. Selected clients can have influence at any level of policy-making, such as government entities, non-profit organisations, private businesses and even politicians.

The project provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate skills learned in the two-year MPP programme while engaging with stakeholders to create tangible results that hopefully generate positive impact outside of simply pursuing activities for profit. Past years’ teams have worked on various foreign policy projects, but the selection of EIN as a client marks the first time a group of Luskin MPP students have helped assist in the development of international human rights policy more specifically.

The four students, all passionate about international affairs, human rights and organisational management, were from different parts of the world and were excited to work with a European non-profit like EIN. The initial system they designed for EIN was built on value criteria, used ECtHR data and checked for consistency through a bias analysis.

EIN worked with the team to identify as objectively as possible values by which a pending, non-implemented case could be judged. These included variables such as the length of time pending since the final judgment, the number of repetitive violations attached to each leading case, and others. The HUDOC-EXEC online database provided details for each case that could be used as values for the comparison. The students normalised the values, then used an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to weigh the values in a relative pairwise analysis. AHP has been used across a variety of fields and helps decision-makers narrow down potential alternatives. In this case, it was used to narrow down pending cases through ordering by values. This ultimately provided a final score indicating EIN’s predicted interest in working on a case and in focusing on cases from prospective countries.

After creating the evaluation system, the students were able to run some initial tests. This led them to identifying countries where high counts of repetitive cases indicated large-scale systematic judicial failures, violation patterns across states and continent, and areas that could drastically benefit from increased engagement.

In late May, the students presented their project in Los Angeles to their cohort, Luskin professors, researchers and policy-makers. Following their graduation, all of the students will be continuing with their policy careers in the US. Perez is completing her medical residence in Los Angeles; Smith will be working on world heritage preservation in Boston; Meng has accepted a role at a major Chinese-California investment firm; and Coltellaro is preparing to take the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Officer Test in fall 2018.