International Human Rights Courts and Domestic Politics

Abstract

Human rights protection has undergone a profound progress in the past decades, especially in terms of internationalization and judicialization. Some of the international human rights regimes have established international courts charged with supervision of the states parties' observation of their human rights obligations under the respective human rights treaties. Since then, there has been a growing interest among political scientists, lawyers and international relations scholars in the role of international (human rights) courts and their impact on state practice. Several theoretical strands emerged, some of them focusing on the structure of the international order and of the respective international human rights regime, others on the state-level factors. Recently, the scholarly focus has shifted towards the study of domestic political arena and asks how it matters for compliance with decisions of international human rights courts and, more generally, for their effectiveness and for the structure of relations between the domestic actors and international human rights courts. In this regard the role of domestic politics is twofold. On the one hand, international human rights courts are not able to enforce their rulings on their own and the domestic actors may play a crucial law-enforcement role, and thus contribute significantly to the international human rights courts' impact. On the other hand, the international human rights courts hold the states accountable for their internal activities and may rule against the interests of the states. Therefore, the domestic actors can also be the source of discontent, ignorance or even backlash against the international human rights courts, as the recent events in various human rights regimes show. This panel addresses salient questions of interrelations between the international human rights courts and domestic legal and political institutions. The panel contains both theoretical and empirical papers focused on the European and Inter-American regional human rights systems. The theoretical paper questions existing theoretical approaches and provides a general framework for studying the relations between international human rights courts and domestic political actors. The empirical papers, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, are more specific as they examine the particular domestic actors' (such as civil society, constitutional courts or the ordinary judiciary) attitudes towards international human rights courts and their significance for the effectiveness of international human rights courts.

Title	Details
Delayed but not Derailed: Legislative Compliance with European Court of Human Rights Judgments	View Paper Details
It Does not End in Strasbourg: The Structure of the European Human Rights Regime	View Paper Details
(Cross) Referencing Between Constitutional Courts and International HR Bodies in Times of transition: Case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia	View Paper Details
Dual Nature of the Freedom of Expression in the Light of Discourses on Truth and Censorship in Plato’s Politeia	View Paper Details
An Exploration of the Characteristics of Ethnic Minority in the International Legal Orders	View Paper Details