A typology of local governments’ engagement with human rights: Legal pluralist contributions to international law and human rights

Abstract

Local governments around the world have been engaging with international law and policy at an exponential intensity, with prominent engagement in climate change, migration and more recently human rights. This engagement cannot be adequately understood within the terms and framework of positive international law alone. This contribution aims to map and create a grounded typology of local government engagement with human rights, encompassing both activities within their localities and outside - at national, international or transnational scales. The article introduces local governments’ engagement in the Formation of Human Rights, Implementation of Human Rights, Defence of Human Rights, Coordination of Human Rights, Dissemination of Human Rights and the Contestation of Human Rights as empirical ideal types that have emerged from data through grounded theory. Analysing this engagement from the perspectives of both positive international law as well as legal pluralism, with specific focus on the New Haven School of Law, the article argues that local governments are now at the core of a newly formed norm-generating community. Local governments engage with local and international actors and processes both within the rules of inclusion of contemporary international law-making - seeking to expand these norms to include local governments themselves - but they also contest and challenge the very rules of the game in the first place, and resort to creating “human rights in the city” as a body of norms parallel to international human rights law. Whether we accept a pluralist understanding of international law to include local governments and their human rights engagement, or whether we consider these developments to be outside international law, forming a parallel normative order in the legal pluralist sense, local government engagement with human rights has already succeeded in reaching and influencing many established international actors and has already infiltrated recent instruments of positive international law.

The Australia’s Foreign Relations Act and Australia’s Relationship with International Law

“…143 In this way, governance networks not only provide a forum for the sharing of information and expertise, and a vehicle for lobbying and the exertion of influence, but they also play a 'jurisgenerative role,' 144 allowing subnational governments to function as part of a 'norm-generating community'. 145 They provide a space for the concretisation of standards developing at the subnational level, and facilitate their translation to the international level. Such an understanding of the role of governance networks is consistent with theoretical approaches to international law and lawmaking that consider more generally how non-state, sub-state and suprastate actors make normative contributions to the corpus of international law even while acting outside international law's formal structures and processes.…”

Print Rights with a Thousand Masks: Migrant Vulnerability, Resistance and Human Rights Law

“…Second, while the national government of the Netherlands has trended towards an increasingly restrictive alienage law regime, municipalities have exhibited varying methods of providing services for migrants residing within their cities, including with the support of international human rights law (Baumgärtel & Oomen, 2019;Durmuş, 2020;Oomen & Baumgärtel, 2018;Spencer, 2020;Spencer & Delvino, 2019). In an effort to seek shelter and make themselves visible, in September 2012, a movement of undocumented migrants in Amsterdam called We Are Here employed a strategy of squatting and claiming public spaces in protest of national migration and alienage law (Hajer & Bröer, 2020).…”

Transnational city networks and their contributions to norm-generation in international law: the case of migration

“…Our case studies focus not on all normative engagement by local governments but practices in their non-state and autonomous rather than substate character (as state organs) (Nijman 2016;Durmuş 2020). This autonomous, contesting normative engagement of local governments remains underexamined in literature and by IOs whereas the substate character (UNGA 2008, Art.…”