Beyond Compliance: Rethinking the Effectiveness of Regional Human Rights Regimes

iCourts lunch seminar with Dilek Kurban.

The European, African and inter-American human rights regimes seem not to be effective vis-à-vis non-democratic states. Conventional theories, based on the experience of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), equate the effectiveness of regional courts with compliance. This perspective is inadequate to explain the status quo, where illiberal states may execute individual rulings while violating the underpinning norms. Scholarship on the Global South suggests that the experiences of the inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) offer an underexplored potential to increase our understanding, and a great potential to draw lessons for the European context, which is increasingly dealing with illiberalism. From a compliance perspective, the IACtHR and the ACtHPR have been hardly effective. Yet, if we take societal impact as an indicator, their experiences might indeed provide important insights.

ERC Starting Grant recipient research project BeyondCompliance asks: What are the historical, institutional, and legal-jurisprudential conditions for the effectiveness of human rights regimes in non-democratic contexts? It starts from the working hypothesis that regimes can only be effective if they: 1) ensure states’ execution of their rulings (compliance); 2) make full use of their powers (exhaustiveness); and 3) empower domestic activists in their domestic struggles (responsiveness). It tests this view by analyzing how the three regimes have enforced their norms against states engaging serious in systematic human rights and rule of law violations. Based on archival and legal research, and interviews, it will develop an empirically based theory on effectiveness in three steps: 1) a comparative historical institutional analysis to identify the three regimes’ founding goals; 2) a socio-legal analysis of the extent to which they have adhered to these goals vis-à-vis illiberal states; 3) a normative framework on how they can enhance their effectiveness.

Bio

Dilek Kurban is a Senior Researcher at the Law Faculty of the University of Amsterdam and is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant recipient research project “Beyond Compliance: Rethinking the Effectiveness of Regional Human Rights Regimes”. Her research interests are regional hman rights regimes, systemic human rights and rule of law violations, legal mobilization, and democracy studies, with a thematic focus on authoritarian regimes.

Kurban holds a PhD from Maastricht University Faculty of Law, a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University. Her PhD dissertation received the 2018 Erasmus Dissertation Prize in the Netherlands and was published as a book titled Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (CUP, 2020), which was awarded a Special Mention by the International Society of Public Law (ICON.S) Book Prize Committee. Kurban was a post-doctoral researcher at iCourts, University of Copenhagen and a Max Weber post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute (EUI). She held research fellowships at Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL), EUI, Hertie School, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, and European Center for Minority Issues. Kurban received research funding from the European Commission (ERC, Marie Curie and FP grant programs), Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Mercator Stiftung, Columbia Universoty and Columbia Law School. She has published in peer-reviewed journals including the European Journal of International Law (EJIL); University of California Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law; Human Rights Law Review; and Columbia Human Rights Law Review. She reviews article and book submissions, including for Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Michigan University Press, EJIL, Global Constitutionalism, European Constitutional Law Review.

Before transitioning to academia, Kurban had an established career in policy development and international organizations. During 2005-2013, she engaged in policy-oriented research at Turkey’s then leading think-tank, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), most recently as the Director of its Democratization Program. She advised the European Commission on anti-discrimination in Turkey as part of the Network of Independent Experts on Non-Discrimination (2012-2019). Earlier in her career, she worked as an Associate Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York.