Abstract

The European, African and inter-American human rights regimes seem not to be effective vis-à-vis non-democratic states. Conventional theories, based on the experience of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), equate the effectiveness of regional courts with compliance. This perspective is inadequate to explain the status quo, where illiberal states may execute individual rulings while violating the underpinning norms. Scholarship on the Global South suggests that the experiences of the inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) offer an underexplored potential to increase our understanding, and a great potential to draw lessons for the European context, which is increasingly dealing with illiberalism. From a compliance perspective, the IACtHR and the ACtHPR have been hardly effective. Yet, if we take societal impact as an indicator, their experiences might indeed provide important insights.

This lecture will present the new ERC-funded research project; Beyond Compliance: Rethinking the Effectiveness of Regional Human Rights Regimes. The project seeks answers to the following research question: What are the historical, institutional, and legal-jurisprudential conditions for the effectiveness of human rights regimes in non-democratic contexts? It starts from the working hypothesis that regimes can only be effective if they: 1) ensure states’ execution of their rulings (compliance); 2) make full use of their powers (exhaustiveness); and 3) empower domestic activists in their domestic struggles (responsiveness). It tests this view by analyzing how the three regimes have enforced their norms against states engaging serious in systematic human rights and rule of law violations.

Based on archival and legal research, and interviews, the project will develop an empirically based theory on effectiveness in three steps: 1) a comparative historical institutional analysis to identify the three regimes’ founding goals; 2) a socio-legal analysis of the extent to which they have adhered to these goals vis-à-vis illiberal states; 3) a normative framework on how they can enhance their effectiveness.

Speaker

Dilek Kurban is Senior Researcher at the Department of International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL).

Kurban’s research interests are supranational human rights courts, systemic violations of human rights, rule of law and democracy, and legal mobilization, with a focus on authoritarian regimes. She explored on these issues in her monograph titled Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (CUP, 2020), which was awarded a Special Mention by the International Society of Public Law (ICON.S) Book Prize Committee. Kurban’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the European Journal of International Law, Human Rights Law Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review and University of California Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law.