Looking at a random sample of international agreements across the issues areas of economics, environment, human rights, and security, it is striking that human rights agreements (HRAs) are significantly more likely to be imprecise than agreements in any other issue area. Is that because HRAs are just meaningless scraps of papers? Or is this imprecision a deliberate, rational choice by states/negotiators designing these agreements? This paper aims to unpack the “black box” of HRAs in order to understand what renders them to be less precise than other international agreements. Drawing on Rational Design theory, we argue that the imprecision is a rational, purposive response to the recurrent cooperation problems faced by states negotiating such agreements. This analysis is the first consideration of how the Rational Design cooperation problems interact, since Rational Design posits a series of univariate conjectures. We focus on two problems in particular: Distribution problems and Coordination problems. We argue that, because HRAs are more likely than any other issue area to be characterized by Distribution problems without Coordination problems, large, heterogeneous groups of states with various cultures, ideologies, and institutional differences can solve the underlying cooperation problems in human rights through imprecise language, reservations, and optional protocols. We examine our conjectures using the Continent of International Law (COIL) dataset, and preliminary results suggest that HRAs could indeed be rationally designed
