Competition and Complementarity between Global and Regional Human Rights Institutions

Abstract

Fragmentation and competition between global and regional institutions are not among the major issues that threaten the regime. There are three ways in which tensions nonetheless arise. First, consistent with the universalist aspirations of human rights, global conventions have played a focal role in verbally defining rights. This masks considerable cross-regional and intra-regional differences in how rights should be interpreted. Second, judicialization of human rights has mostly occurred at the regional level. This occasionally creates inconsistencies with the global regime. Third, rights concerns often encroach on other areas of international cooperation, including security, trade, and development. This raises similar issues of forum shopping as in the other issue areas, for example because some governments may shop for trade agreements or development loans with fewer rights conditions.

The more the better? The complementarity of United Nations institutions in the fight against torture

“…More broadly, recent literature has increasingly focused on the parallel existence of overlapping human rights bodies, including, but not limited to, the UN system. Examples of this are Erik Voeten's 31 and Emilie Hafner-Burton's 32 overviews of the global and regional human rights regimes; Courtney Hillebrecht's 33 study on overlaps between the Inter-American human rights system on the one hand, and UN treaty bodies and UPR on the other; Solomon Ebobrah's 34 work on the complementarity between institutions in the African human rights system; and Laura Gómez-Mera's 35 work on human trafficking. Theoretically, most of these works conceive of human rights bodies as part of a regime complex, namely a set of partially overlapping and nonhierarchically ordered instruments that monitor or regulate the same issue area.…”