Promoting Human Rights: The Role of Law and Courts

Session Submission Type: In-Person Created Panel

Session Description

The protection of human rights is a fundamental component for democracies and the rule of law. Yet, rights violations remain ubiquitous, including within consolidated democracies. This panel examines how law and courts affect the protection of human rights via rights consciousness, litigation and advocacy, and judicial outcomes. From utilizing legal ambiguity to systematically punish political dissidents, using treaty reservations to reduce rights protections or ensure domestic ratification, promoting legal literacy to facilitate rights claims, relying on judicial settlements to perpetuate colonization and erode indigenous rights, to criminalizing rights advocacy, these papers show that law and courts do not have a single, linear role in the protection of human rights. Instead, these roles are complex, dynamic, and dependent upon the legal and institutional frameworks in which courts operate.

Sub Unit

• Division 26: Law and Courts

Cosponsor

• Division 17: International Collaboration

Individual Presentations

• Egypt's Criminalization of Human Rights Advocacy - Carol J. Gray, University of Connecticut

• Governing by Ambiguity: Evidence from the Chinese Judicial System - Qingyan WANG, University of Georgia; Yifeng Wan, Johns Hopkins University; Nanxi Zeng, Johns Hopkins University

• The Political Sources of Rights Consciousness and Claiming: Insights from Chile - Lisa Hilbink, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Valentina Salas, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• The Three R's of CEDAW Commitment: Ratification, Reservation, and Rejection - Willow Kreutzer, University of Iowa; Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, University of Iowa

Chair

• Jeffrey Davis University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Discussants

• Jeffrey Davis University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom University of British Columbia