When nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the... Show moreWhen nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the overlapping phenomena of shrinking civic space within authoritarian, hybrid, and democratically backsliding regimes, and state backlash against international courts, NGOs navigate two potential levels of state backlash against human rights accountability. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on legal mobilization, we develop an integrated framework for explaining how states' two-level (domestic and international) backlash tactics can both promote and deter NGOs' strategic litigation at international human rights courts (IHRCs). States' backlash tactics can influence NGOs' opportunities, capacities, and goals for their human rights advocacy, and thus affect whether and how they pursue strategic litigation at IHRCs. We elucidate the value of this framework through case studies of NGOs' litigation against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, an understudied IHRC. Drawing on an original data set, interviews, and documentation, we process-trace how Tanzania's various backlash tactics influenced whether and how NGOs litigated at the Court. Our framework and analysis show how state backlash against human rights accountability affects NGOs' mobilization at IHRCs and, relatedly, IHRCs' opportunities for influence. Show less
Cultural objects have a protected status on account of their intangible value, as symbols of an identity. This has been so since the early days of international law, and today there is an extensive... Show moreCultural objects have a protected status on account of their intangible value, as symbols of an identity. This has been so since the early days of international law, and today there is an extensive legal framework that ensures this protection.Yet, when it comes to claims by former owners to items such as Nazi looted art, colonial booty, or more recently looted antiquities, the situation is less straightforward. On the one hand, such claims are often not supported by positive law at all. On the other hand, non-binding regulations urge present possessors to find `just' solutions to claims – not as a legal obligation but as a matter of morality. This raises a fundamental question: if we believe that the application of the law leads to injustice, is it not time to change the law or the way it is applied?This study explores how cross-border claims to cultural objects fit in the wider legal framework, and where blind spots or clashes occur. Its aim is to identify new directions that can help further develop this field, with the ultimate aim of fostering just solutions. Show less
In the recent international campaigns against child marriage, there is a puzzle of agency: while international human rights institutions celebrate when girls exercise their agency not to marry,... Show moreIn the recent international campaigns against child marriage, there is a puzzle of agency: while international human rights institutions celebrate when girls exercise their agency not to marry, they do not recognize their agency to marry. ‘Child marriage’, defined as “any formal marriage or informal union where one or both of the parties are under 18 years of age”, is considered always forced, assuming that children are not capable of consenting to marriages. In order to re-examine, reflect, and discuss this approach to agency, this dissertation offers empirical evidence of child marriage, based on findings from the author’s fieldwork in Indonesia. Why children marry and how this practice both informs, and is treated within, multiple competing normative frameworks in place? The dissertation starts from analysing child marriage discourse at the international level, moves to discuss the political contestation over child marriage at the national level (Indonesia), and then investigates child marriage as a social practice on the Indonesian island of Bali.This is a socio-legal study of international human rights, which contributes to the scholarly field of human rights and children’s rights by using ideas from the other disciplines in social science. Show less
This dissertation is inspired by the question how national authorities can be motivated to advance the fight against impunity by investigating and prosecuting those responsible for mass atrocities... Show moreThis dissertation is inspired by the question how national authorities can be motivated to advance the fight against impunity by investigating and prosecuting those responsible for mass atrocities through their domestic justice systems. Whereas international scholarship has often sought to answer such questions by looking at international criminal courts, this study proposes instead to turn our gaze towards the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.Since the days of the Cold War, the Inter-American human rights system has been an important ally for victims and civil society groups pushing their governments to recognize and investigate serious and systemic violations of human rights and bring the perpetrators to justice. It has thus been involved in the fight against impunity for decades.This dissertation examines both the legal doctrines developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to further the fight against impunity and the practical contributions of those doctrines to domestic accountability processes in Latin America. It argues that the Inter-American system has made important contributions to several aspects of domestic accountability processes. However, in order to understand these contributions, we have to step outside the compliance framework often employed in legal scholarship to the study of international courts. Show less
