How Far You Can Go Depends on Where You Sit: Geography, Lawyers, and Unequal Access to International Human Rights Justice

Where victims are located conditions whether and how they can access international human rights justice, and whether they ultimately succeed once they do. This article argues that access to international human rights courts is shaped not only by procedural rules or claimant characteristics, but also by the unequal spatial distribution of the lawyers who make international litigation possible. Lawyers capable of transforming domestic grievances into international human rights claims are not evenly distributed, nor are they necessarily located in the capital cities. Instead, they are often concentrated in specific geographical locations, and proximity to these locations systematically increases both the likelihood that a claim reaches an international court and the chances that it results in a finding of a violation. While prior research shows that international legal practice is dominated by lawyers from OECD countries or the Global West, human rights litigation has received far less scrutiny from a spatial perspective. We address this gap through an in-depth study of access to the European Court of Human Rights in Slovenia. Using original data and geographic information systems (GIS), we map the location of lawyers registered nationally, those appearing before the Constitutional Court, and those representing applicants before the ECtHR, and we geocode victims to assess how distance to legal expertise shapes both access to international litigation and litigation outcomes. We show that even in a small country, human rights litigation is highly concentrated in a limited number of localities that function as domestic human rights “hot spots.” Applicants located closer to these clusters are more likely to find representation that can help them internationalise and succeed in their claims. Our findings reveal geography as an important dimension of barriers to access in international human rights adjudication.