Enforcement mechanisms of human rights

6 Key excerpts on "Enforcement mechanisms of human rights"

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  International Human Rights

  A Survey

  • Cher Weixia Chen, Alison Dundes Renteln(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Council of Europe’s website on the European Convention on Human Rights (n.d.) has begun to publicize the impact of the European Court: When the European Court of Human Rights finds a violation, the country in question often has to take compliance measures and to amend parts of its legislation. The Court’s judgments also lead to frequent evolutions of national tribunals’ case-law.  Austria ended the monopoly applying to television  Belgium amended its laws on homeless people and adopted measures to prohibit any discrimination against children born outside marriage  Bulgaria created an alternative to military service for conscientious objectors  Croatia introduced an effective remedy against the excessive length of court proceedings  the Czech Republic passed a new bankruptcy law  Denmark extended the right not to belong to a trade union  Finland amended its law on child custody and visiting rights  France, Spain, and the United Kingdom passed laws on telephone tapping  Germany gave celebrities a greater right not to have their private photographs published  Greece improved detention conditions for foreigners awaiting deportation  Hungary introduced fairer decision-making with regard to prolongation of remand in custody  Ireland decriminalized homosexual acts  Italy made it compulsory for defense lawyers to appear before the Court of Cassation  Latvia abolished discriminatory language tests for election candidates  Moldova recognized freedom of religion  the Netherlands amended its legislation on the detention of patients with mental illnesses  Poland introduced an effective compensation system for certain persons whose property had been expropriated following the Second World War  Romania canceled provisions making it possible to annul final court decisions  the Russian Federation improved the provision of social welfare for the victims of Chernobyl 58 Human Rights Machinery: Enforcement Mechanisms

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  Texts and Materials on International Human Rights

  • Rhona K.M. Smith(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Monitoring and enforcing human rights: extra-conventional mechanisms

  Chapter contents

  6.1 Human Rights Council 6.2 The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 6.3 United Nations Security Council: responsibility to protect, and sanctions 6.4 International criminal courts, tribunals and processes 6.5 Organisation of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

  For most readers, the importance of human rights is as the mechanism by which one’s rights may be enforced. Although ideally each State should ensure all the human rights to everyone within their jurisdiction, this is not always the reality. This chapter will identify the key international and regional mechanisms deployed by the organisations mentioned in the previous chapters to effect human rights. The focus is on investigative mechanisms and independent fact-finding systems, as well as those systems through which organisations oversee all human rights (rather than those in a specific treaty).

  • The Human Rights Council.
    • Universal periodic review of all States.
    • Special mechanisms to investigate human rights by theme or country through the deployment of an independent expert.
  • UNESCO and its system of individual complaint over infringements of human rights in the sphere of its work.
  • The potential impact of sanctions ordered by the Security Council to coerce a State into complying with human rights (or other international laws).
  • Reconciliation through truth-finding missions and international court and tribunal processes held after a series of flagrant violations of human rights and part of the mechanism for rebuilding the State.
  • Organisation of American States’ general jurisdiction. The general jurisdiction of the OAS is one of the few mechanisms under which individual complaints against the United States of America can be examined.

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  International Human Rights Law

  Cases, Materials, Commentary

  • Olivier De Schutter(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART III The Mechanisms of Protection 8 Ensuring compliance with international human rights law: the role of national authorities INTRODUCTION Since the general framework of international human rights law has been built, in the 1960s to the 1980s, a new generation of questions has arisen which focuses more on the effectiveness of that framework and, particularly, on its impact at national level. The role of national authorities is vital in this respect. International human rights can only be effective on the ground, where they really matter, if national courts, parliaments, and governments rely on them, and if civil society mobilizes in order to hold authorities accountable on that basis (see, e.g., D. Beyleveld, ‘The Concept of a Human Right and Incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ (1995) Public Law, 577; C. Heyns and F. Viljoen, The Impact of the United Nations Human Rights Treaties on the Domestic Level (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002); O. Schachter, ‘The Obligation to Implement the Covenant in Domestic Law’, in L. Henkin (ed.), The International Bill of Rights: The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 311; on the role of national courts in applying international human rights, see B. Conforti and F. Francioni (eds.), Enforcing International Human Rights in Domestic Courts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997)). Pressure from below is especially important since neither foreign governments nor international actors can substitute for the role of local actors. As we have seen, inter- national human rights treaties are specific in that they are concluded not in the interest of the parties but for the benefit of the population under the jurisdiction of the parties.

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  Power and Law in International Society

  International Relations as the Sociology of International Law

  • Mark Klamberg(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5.2.4 , individuals and non-state actors can, if the concerned state consents, have access to international mechanisms where they can file complaints against states for violations of their human rights. However, the domestic arena has even more potential for enforcing human rights than the international mechanisms.

  Henkin explains that the incentive for states to promote and participate in the human rights discourse depends on a state’s traditions and commitments. Domestic influences are more relevant in this for the observance of human rights law than other parts of international law.68 Helfer and Slaughter argue that liberal democratic governments will be more likely to comply with supranational legal judgments than other states because international legal obligations mobilize domestic interest groups that, in turn, pressure the government to comply from within the state.69

  Most empirical studies on international human rights reach a similar conclusion: that the effectiveness of international law is mediated by domestic institutions and domestic actors. International human rights law largely depends on mechanisms of norm diffusion, and the effect of human rights treaties is typically indirect, depending on the domestic channels used in specific contexts. Ginsburg and Shaffer note that answers to the key question of whether improvements in terms of human rights may be associated with, and explained by, international law are typically linked to the existence of certain conditions. A reoccurring theme in literature is that effective human rights protection requires domestic institutions, so that consent to human rights treaties is more likely to improve performance in democracies than in autocracies.70 Patterns of norm diffusion in relation to human rights may be found in various areas of domestic governance, for example welfare and labor policy71 and universal suffrage.72 Risse and Sikkink describe this in terms of international “norms cascade”.73

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  Freedom from Want

  The Human Right to Adequate Food

  • George Kent(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  Consider the example of controlling speeding drivers on the highway. In some cases, signs about speed limits may be su~cient. In other cases, it may be useful to have a large digital sign connected to a radar device that tells individual drivers how fast they are going. Or it could tell them by how much they are exceeding the legal speed limit. For some drivers, this would be su~cient. For others, it might be nec-essary to connect the radar to a police o~cer and court system that imposes fines and suspends drivers’ licenses. In the international human rights system, there is little capacity to actually pursue and punish human rights violators. However, there is a reasonably good system of detection, by both governmental and civil society agencies. Although not backed by powerful tools of correction, these alerting mechanisms do appear to have considerable eƒect. human rights systems 128 Accountability mechanisms are institutional arrangements for providing feedback to the implementation mechanisms—the agencies designated with pri-mary responsibility for ensuring the realization of rights—and also to other par-ties that may have some role in ensuring the realization of rights. An accounta-bility mechanism functions by assessing the performance of the agencies responsible for the implementation of human rights, much as a police o~cer might monitor the speed of passing cars. The monitoring agent informs the re-sponsible parties of those assessments to guide them toward improving that per-formance. In some cases, the accountability mechanism might also have the power to impose sanctions of diƒerent types, but in many cases they function on the basis of “constructive dialogue”—persuasion rather than punishment. Accountability mechanisms might take several forms. With regard to national human rights performance, accountability from “above” comes from interna-tional organizations, particularly the United Nations treaty bodies.

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  The International Politics of Judicial Intervention

  Creating a more just order

  • Andrea Birdsall(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Human rights laws that emerged after the Second World War can be divided into two categories: broad guidelines that set out very general rights, and more specific crimes that are seen to be fundamental to all states in international society and therefore warrant special provisions for their enforcement. This chapter argues that the main difficulty facing international law is that it operates without a central overarching authority to ensure the enforcement of its provisions and is dependent on some form of agency and voluntary state co-operation. Even though states agree on codifying human rights into international law, no effective independent enforcement mechanisms are attached to them. Existing enforcement through UN institutions is limited to monitoring and reporting on states’ compliance. Two well-documented attempts to go beyond these limited powers briefly discussed in this chapter are the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Both are examples of judicial intervention by one or more states aimed at enforcing existing human rights provisions. Despite a number of problems and issues raised in these cases, this chapter argues that they constitute valuable precedents and starting points from which subsequent developments in human rights law implementation, in line with the norm life cycle, could take place.

  The emergence of international human rights and the Nuremberg precedent

  International relations have historically been dominated by the Westphalian principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention in the internal affairs of another state. Traditionally, states were seen as the principal actors in international relations and the treatment of their citizens was solely considered to be within their national jurisdiction. In line with realist approaches, international law was seen to be primarily concerned with regulating relations between states and protecting the own interests of those states. This changed after the Second World War when it was recognized that Nazi aggression and the atrocities committed resulted from a ‘philosophy based on utter disregard for the dignity of human beings’ (Cassese 2001:351). It was decided that basic standards for human rights needed to be formulated and promoted in the international community to ensure a recognition that individuals have rights independently from states. Initially, a set of general principles on human rights that provided broad guidelines for the UN and its members was negotiated, followed by their gradual elaboration and implementation through more concrete legal provisions. This was the start of the first stage in the norm life cycle: the emergence of ‘new’ issues of importance that were codified into international law to clarify their content and to include new standards of appropriate behaviour.

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