Activists in International Courts: Theorizing Dynamics (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: International Human Rights Courts and the Politics of Mobilization and Backlash

Abstract

This paper examines how rights advocates influence the decisions of international human rights courts—for instance, the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—and the impact of those decisions on the ground, despite a growing backlash of states against international courts. It integrates two bodies of literature. The international relations and international law scholarship on judicialization of international politics and state compliance often acknowledges but does not theorize the role of activists in international law. In contrast, a second body of scholarship, on transnational advocacy networks and legal mobilization, often does theorize the role of activists in international and domestic politics but does not frequently theorize the role of activism in the context of international courts and the practice of international litigation. While both bodies of literature acknowledge the role of nonstate actors, they seldom present a coherent picture of dynamic relationships between nonstate actors, states, and international courts. We argue that, beyond simply influencing the outcome of a case in an international court, rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual cause lawyers—have multiple reverberating effects upon all stages of case development and impact. This paper, first, integrates scholarship on the relationships between states and international courts with the literature on legal mobilization by human rights advocates. Second, it identifies and illustrates three fields in which the dynamic relationships among courts, rights advocates, and states play out: (1) contraction and expansion of the authority of international courts, (2) litigation and implementation, and (3) responses to state backlash.

Authors

• Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, University of British Columbia

• Freek van der Vet, University of British Columbia