Regional Human Rights

The three main regional systems--the Organization of America States (OAS) and the Council of Europe (CoE), and the African Union (AU)--include 137 of the 193 UN member states and are more prolific than the UN system. Further, they are home to the world’s only international courts devoted to human rights adjudication – a feature that gives them a singular status in shaping the direction of human rights law, and in interacting with domestic legal systems. Recent  histories of human rights, however, have not given emphasis to the development of the regional human rights systems as a distinct phenomenon, and there is no book-length work that examines their contribution to the development of human rights through the lens of law and politics.

Our project aims to deepen our understanding of the history of human rights by examining the political history of the regional human rights systems, taken together. It focuses on the African, American, and European systems because they are the largest and most influential. Further, unlike the UN system, these three regional systems have emphasized adjudication, thereby transforming the practice of human rights into a practice that foregrounds litigation, binding adjudication, and a body of case law. The deeper legalization of these systems, we shall show, gives them a distinct manner of exerting influence, at times embedding them deeply in everyday national politics. The regional human rights systems did not compete against or simply replicate the universal system, but came to reinforce and reshape it by contributing something entirely new.

The study will draw on three sets of data: 1) interviews with diplomats, civil servants, and lawyers who have worked in or litigated before the three regional rights systems; 2) primary documents from archives of the debates leading up to the creation of the systems, 3) and judgments, reports and other documents generated by the systems, and by the civil society groups that focus on litigation before the systems.