Making the People the Protagonists: Democratizing Human Rights Enforcement

Can grassroots, restorative justice mechanisms, developed largely in transitional justice movements, be adapted to provide effective human rights enforcement? There is irony in relying on states and state-dependent institutions to enforce human rights. After all, people possess human rights inherently, regardless of any delegation by their state. State actors are almost always the protagonists in committing rights violations, thus making them unreliable performers in the role of human rights defender. It is not surprising then that scholars like Sikkink, Epp and Kattel find strong human rights NGOs to be essential for effective human rights protections. Without pressure from beyond the state, from grassroots local, national, and international NGOs, states are often willing to stick to their habitual impunity. Transitional justice movements across the globe have developed “bottom up” justice mechanisms to overcome the shortcomings of overly legalistic, state-centred processes. For example, organizations in Northern Ireland have implemented “community regeneration initiatives” to address the harms committed during the sectarian conflict. In addition, some national and local governments have embraced restorative practices, mediative justice, and other innovative conflict resolution methods to give victims, accused offenders, and communities the primary roles in repairing harms caused by injustice. This paper addresses the following research questions: 1. To what extent do states that relinquish the sole authority to enforce human rights law to beyond-the-state institutions more effectively protect the rights of their people? 2. What restorative, mediative, inquisitorial, and other non-adversarial conflict resolutions approaches have been effective in providing justice in other settings? 3. To what extent can grassroots techniques including restorative, mediative, inquisitorial, and other non-adversarial conflict resolution approaches be used to effectively enforce human rights law. To answer these questions, I conduct interviews and case studies in several nations in Europe and the Americas. I then test my qualitative findings by running a quantitative analysis, taking advantage of innovative human rights datasets (Fariss and Fariss, Kenwick and Reuning).