The Hidden Hands of Justice

NGOs, international courts, and state backlash against human rights accountability: Evidence from NGO mobilization against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights

“…Generally, NGOs' strategic behavior focused on advocating for their issue, rather than defending their legal opportunities and the IHRC from backlash. This is an important caveat for accounts that stress NGOs' contributions to institution‐building in IHRCs (e.g., Haddad, 2018), to IHRCs' resilience against state backlash (Gonzalez‐Ocantos & Sandholtz, 2022, pp. 100–1), and to expanding legal opportunity structures more generally (e.g., Vanhala, 2017, p. 125).…”

“…Empirically, we provide an unprecedented quantitative and qualitative analysis of the African Court, which is typically excluded from analyses of IHRCs that overwhelmingly focus on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) (e.g., Haddad, 2018;Hillebrecht, 2019Hillebrecht, , 2021Sandholtz et al, 2018). Existing literature on the African Court's cases primarily analyzes its jurisprudence.…”

Foreign agents or agents of justice? Private foundations, backlash against non-governmental organizations, and international human rights litigation

“…The ECtHR is an international court of last resort that holds governments to account for human rights violations, and therefore is an attractive mechanism for human rights advancement. NGOs are also an important vehicle for supporting successful case applications and providing supplemental information as third parties, as well as promoting the implementation of domestic government actions demanded by the ECtHR in order to abide by the human rights principles included in the European Convention on Human Rights on which the Court bases its decisions (Cichowski, 2016; Dothan, 2016; Haddad, 2018; Hodson, 2011; Mayer, 2011; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2018). Sundstrom (2014), however, argues that different NGOs have different goals in litigation, with some aiming to find justice for individual applicants without necessarily concerning themselves with broader human rights progress or jurisprudence, and others more strategically concerned with expanding the Court's jurisprudence in certain areas or promoting the implementation of Court decisions on the ground.…”

Activists in international courts: Backlash, funding, and strategy in international legal mobilization

“…As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al, 2018; Sandholtz et al, 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon.…”

“…By examining how rights advocates navigate this space, we wish to go beyond successful cases, or what Helen Duffy (2018) has called the “champagne moment” in strategic litigation, which focuses on judgments alone and presumes a linear pathway from litigant to judgment to successful policy reform. Studies of international litigation have shown that rights advocates are active far before and after these judgments: they select strategic cases to forward to international courts, persuade judges of the soundness of the claims (sometimes after numerous unsuccessful attempts), engage in follow‐up advocacy for the domestic implementation of final judgments, and often proliferate their best practices by training other activists (Duffy, 2018; Haddad, 2018; Kahraman, 2018; Kurban, 2020; Sundstrom, 2012; van der Vet, 2012). Our collection of articles in this symposium explores the following themes: Backlash against NGOs : Scholars have demonstrated a widespread trend of increasing government restrictions on NGOs in recent years.…”