International Human Rights Courts and the Politics of Mobilization and Backlash

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel will examine various dynamics in the relationships among states, international human rights courts, and rights advocates and victims of violations in current international politics. Relationships between member state governments and courts, governments and their citizens, and civil society mobilization on behalf of victims in interaction with all of these actors are crucial points of contention. Examining these relationships is more urgent than ever in the contemporary era of backlash by states against international courts’ authority. The papers on this panel each address different aspects of these relationships across a broad array of international human rights courts. Hillebrecht presents an overall framework of backlash dynamics among these actors across several courts, and helpfully articulates what we should properly consider to be backlash or not against them. Sundstrom & Van der Vet present a suggested framework to understand more systematically how activists (NGOs and lawyers) fit into these dynamics. Meanwhile, Kahraman shows us a more granular case study of legal mobilization by Turkish labor activists at the European Court of Human Rights, to demonstrate how litigation in international courts has been a helpful way for some social movements to constitute themselves in the first place, suggesting an important reason why some states are pushing back against courts’ jurisdictions. Finally, Conant looks in detail at the case of member state resistance to the expansion of rights at the European Court of Justice in detail, tracing the historical emergence of backlash against that court, and extrapolating what the extreme case of Brexit tells us about the leading frontier of backlash.

Sub Unit

• Division 17: International Collaboration

Cosponsor

• Division 26: Law and Courts

Individual Presentations

• Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash - Courtney Hillebrecht, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

• Activists in International Courts: Theorizing Dynamics (Pre-Recorded) - Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, University of British Columbia; Freek van der Vet, University of British Columbia

• Labor in Hard Times: Mobilizing Workers’ Rights at the ECHR (Pre-Recorded) - Filiz Kahraman, University of Toronto

• Brexit as Backlash Against the European Court of Justice? - Lisa Conant, University of Denver

Chair

• Lisa Conant University of Denver

Discussant

• R. Daniel Kelemen Rutgers University, New Brunswick