Who Files Suit? Legal Mobilization and Torture Violations in Europe

Abstract

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the most active international court. After decades with few allegations of human rights abuses, the ECHR docket expanded in the 1990s. Paradoxically, long‐standing democracies can have standardized violation rates of the prohibition against torture that compare to transitional democracies that struggle to protect rights. Yet it is implausible that human rights abuses increased or that established democracies engage in more torture than new democracies. Instead variations in legal mobilization generate the surge and puzzling distribution of European judgments. I argue that discrepancies between the incidence of torture and litigation reflect variations in support structures, where declared violations can reflect the level of support that individuals receive in pursuing claims rather than the incidence of torture. This dynamic is most pronounced for foreign nationals, who typically possess fewer resources than citizens to access legal institutions and encounter popular and official hostility. As a result, much European litigation concerning torture in long‐standing democracies is transnational in character.

Is Legal Mobilization for the Birds? Legal Opportunity Structures and Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in the United Kingdom, France, Finland, and Italy

“…Epp found that a "support structure"-consisting of organizations committed to establishing rights and access to legal and financial resources-is a necessary condition for a rights revolution. There is now a broad consensus that support structures are central to sustaining legal mobilization efforts (Alter & Vargas, 2000;Cichowski, 2007;Conant, 2002Conant, , 2006Conant, , 2016. Choosing the largest and best-funded environmental NGOs in each jurisdiction allows the research design to control for this factor.…”

Cause Lawyering and Movement Tactics: Disability Rights Movements in South Korea and Japan

“…But lawyers’ roles are understudied. Some scholars emphasize the features of particular advocacy groups, including their resources, level of professionalization, goals, and identity as rights‐promoters (e.g., McCarthy and Zald ; Staggenborg ; Conant ; Wang and Piazza ; Vanhala ). They tend to assume that lawyers will dominate and demobilize, or else they overlook cause lawyers.…”

Explaining interest group litigation in Europe: Evidence from the comparative interest group survey

“…Among the explanatory factors located at the group‐level, the most consistently investigated is that of group resources. Most studies on interest group litigation consider resources central to the mobilization of the law (Berry, 1977; Conant, 2016; Scheppele & Walker, 1991). Litigation requires expertise, time and often substantial amounts of money.…”

“…Access to legal expertise can also be subsumed under this category, in particular the question whether a group employs an in‐house lawyer (Cichowski, 2016, p. 893). Taken together, a number of studies emphasize the importance of a “support structure” (Epp, 1998) to sustain litigation, consisting of financial and legal resources (Cichowski, 2007; Conant, 2016).…”