Emerging Democracies and International Human Rights Institutions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As international human rights institutions face growing backlash amidst a global turn towards isolationism, the ability of those institutions to successfully safeguard the rights of marginalized people has been increasingly called into question. Building from prior research that has found that emerging democracies are particularly likely to join international human rights institutions (Moravcsik 2000, Hafner-Burton et. al 2015), the papers in this panel advance new research agendas exploring how domestic officials in emerging democracies broker understandings of their international human rights obligations through engagement with regional human rights courts, treaty regimes, and other local and international legal actors. In keeping with the 2020 Annual Meeting theme of “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization,” these papers take seriously the tensions between global, regional, and local conceptualizations of best practices for the implementation of international law. The authors employ diverse methodological strategies to analyze the impact of those tensions on a variety of domestic outcomes in emerging democracies, including the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, compliance with regional court judgements, and commitments to human rights treaty regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 45: Human Rights

Cosponsor

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• New Democracies, Sovereignty Costs, and Commitment to Human Rights Treaties - Xinyuan Dai, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Alexandros Tokhi, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• In Defense of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights - Francesca Parente, Christopher Newport University

• Admitting the Past: The Politics of Jurisdiction in Regional Human Rights Courts - Maria Sanchez, University of Minnesota

• Labor in Hard Times: Labor Activists before the European Court of Human Rights - Filiz Kahraman, University of Toronto

Chair

• Courtney Hillebrecht University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Discussant

• Jillienne Haglund University of Kentucky