Inter-American Human Rights System as a Transnational Public Sphere: Legal and Political Aspects of the Implementation of International Decisions (original) (raw)
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Yale Journal of International Law, 2018
International human rights law today is being questioned on the basis of the regime’s scope of authority and enforceability. Since 1988, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has seen its case law and its influence expand. The Court’s opinions, along with the reports of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have become widely seen by domestic courts as authoritative, thereby realizing many of the promises of international norms and holding Latin American States accountable for their unwillingness or inability to fulfill their international obligations. Along with the significant institutionalization of human rights law in other regions, as well as at the global level, human rights law in the Americas has become part of the legal and political landscape of States and the individual, creating a kind of inter-American constitutionalism. Despite this trend, the system of human rights protection has recently come under fire, as have other regional human rights regimes and int...
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This article offers a reconceptualization of the impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS, or the System). To understand the impact of the IAHRS, and the continuing demand for it from across the region of Latin America, in particular, we need to look beyond rule compliance models of international human rights law. This article examines how, in what ways, and under what conditions the IAHRS impacts on domestic human rights. In a nutshell, the IAHRS is activated by domestic stakeholders in ways that transcend traditional compliance perspectives, and that have the potential to provoke positive domestic human rights change.
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The Inter-American human rights system is one of the major regional human rights systems globally. In spite of the availability of human rights instruments in the region, some of which are legally binding, the spate of human rights abuse still leaves a sad commentary. The objective of this paper therefore is to take a critical survey of the human rights instruments in the region with a view to assessing their strengths and constraints. The method of research is basically doctrinal and utilizes the major human rights instruments in the region such as the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of man, and the American Convention on Human Rights in its evaluation. It is the finding of the paper that the Inter-American system indeed has a number of positive features such as the emphasis placed on democratic governance and third party interventions in the adjudicatory process among others. The paper has also identified a number of weaknesses in the system including that the Inter-American Commission lacks the power to refer a case to the Inter-American Court where the State concerned has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights; and further, the Commission's recommendations are not legally binding. Therefore, the paper recommended among other things that the Commission be able to transmit a case directly to the Court whether or not the party concerned has ratified the American Convention.
The Inter-American Human Rights System: Notable Achievements and Enduring Challenges
In the teaching, as well as in the historiography, of international human rights, regional human rights systems, with the partial exception of the European Court of Human Rights, remain marginalised. This is regrettable for a number of reasons; not least because the richness of regional experiences with human rights offers us a more nuanced understanding of the enduring attraction of human rights around the world (as well as a better sense of the diversity and contentious political struggles that characterise them), than that prevailing in the current literature proclaiming the endtimes of human rights (Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2012). Nowhere can this be seen better than in the region of the Americas, where the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) emerged to play a vanguard role in the development of the modern international human rights regime. This short piece briefly reviews the current state of the IAHRS, and highlights its key achievements, as well as some of the many challenges it faces. It should be pointed out, from the outset, that any list of achievements and challenges inevitably depends on perspective, the specific yardstick adopted, and, in particular, the understanding of what could be reasonably expected from the IAHRS.
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Houston Journal of International Law, 1997
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. Affiliation for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and are not to be attributed to the Organization of American States or any of its organs. 1. U.N. CHARTER art. 2, para. 1. 2. See id. arts. 3-4. 3. See ARTHUR LARSON ET AL., SOVEREIGNTY WITHIN THE LAW 125 (1965). 4. See WERNER LEVI, CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL LAW: A CONCISE INTRODUCTION 73 (2d ed. 1991).
The Inter-American Human Rights System: An Effective Institution for Regional Rights Protection?
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The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are charged with protecting human rights in the Western Hemisphere. This Article explains the workings of this regional human rights system, examining its history, composition, functions, jurisdiction, procedure, jurisprudence, and enforcement. The Article also evaluates the system's historical and current effectiveness. Particular attention is given to the disconnect between the system's success with the region's Latin-American nations and its rejection by Anglo-American States, as well as to the potential to use the system to improve human rights in Cuba.
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The Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System beyond Latin America
Transformations on the Ground: The Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System and Ius Constitutionale Commune on Latin America, 2023
Global human rights governance is at a critical juncture. International politics has turned distinctly hostile to human rights. Major powers in the current multi-polar world have embraced a transactional and anti-liberal foreign policy, with little salience given to human rights concerns. The European Union is consumed with disintegrating and nationalistic forces on its own continent, with the so-called populist resurgence underpinning a political vision that is overtly anti-rights. The international human rights regime appears powerless when confronted with entrenched rights-abusive regimes. Even in some scholarly Ivory Towers the international human rights project is dismissed as elitist, rigid and inflexibly imposing a universalising morality at the expense of local customs and standards of behaviour. Confronted with dramatic global inequalities and accelerating climate emergencies, international human rights are criticised for offering little, or no, practical assistance in efforts to bring about a more just and equal world for people, and for being underpinned by minimalist ambitions of the possibilities of a different, more sustainable and just world. It is precisely in relation to these overlapping political, socio-economic and intellectual challenges that I hope to offer in this chapter a partial corrective to the disparate gloomy assessments of the present state and possible future trajectories of international human rights. I will do so through a series of reflections on the contributions of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) to the theory and practice of global human rights governance. More specifically, the chapter highlights three areas of contributions. First, by adopting a historical perspective on the institutional development of the IAHRS, we are reminded of the global and interconnected character of the evolution of the modern international human rights regime. Far from a straightforward narrative of the international human rights as a result of Western imposition, the origins and early developments of the IAHRS demonstrate the central protagonism of the Global South in the emergence and consolidation of global human rights governance. Second, the IAHRS has played a central role in the normative construction and evolving interpretations of international human rights standards. Third, the IAHRS has made important contributions to the theory and practice of human rights governance as an exemplar of how international law and institutions can advance the realisation of rights even in the absence of robust enforcement mechanisms and in often inhospitable political conditions.