Judging Inter-American Human Rights: The Riddle of Compliance with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The use of compliance studies to evaluate the effectiveness of international human rights courts can produce misleading results because a focus on compliance considers the behaviour of only one stakeholder in the dynamic that is human rights adjudication: the state. A survey of petitioners in cases before the IACtHR, together with a review of literature surrounding strategic litigation before the Inter-American system, demonstrate how civil society organisations value the declarative justice provided by the Court, how they mobilise around human rights litigation and how adept they are at deploying rulings in such a way as to produce impact beyond compliance and even in the absence of any compliance at all.

Measuring Up: A Dialogical Model for Assuring a Reparative Process

“…In recognizing this challenge, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) developed the concept of restitutio in integrum to contemplate the provision of a variety of modalities to approximate restoring the status quo ante , such as through restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition 3 . States, in turn, view compliance with reparation judgments in terms of whether they have provided these types of reparations (Huneeus 2011, 501; Contesse 2019; Zuloaga 2020). As follows, case studies, critical accounts, and other commentary about reparations for human rights violations often focus on reparation outcomes in their analysis 4…”

El derecho a la verdad en la jurisprudencia de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos a la luz de las teorías de la justicia

“…El análisis detallado de la primera (por ejemplo, Ferrer Mac-Gregor 2016) ha tendido a relegar la segunda a un segundo plano, algo que el presente artículo y el proyecto de investigación del que es parte buscan corregir. Por tanto, el análisis no aborda el cumplimiento de las sentencias de la CIDH, el cual varía de manera significativa según los aspectos del derecho a la verdad analizados a continuación, 3 y el impacto más allá de dicho cumplimiento (Engstrom 2018, Palacios Zuloaga 2020.…”