Activists in International Courts: Theorizing the Roles of Rights Activists between International Human Rights Courts, States, and Societies

Abstract

To better understand the dynamics between states and international human rights courts, international relations scholars must incorporate a systematic understanding of how nongovernmental rights activists influence the decisions of international human rights courts—for instance, the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—and the impacts of those decisions on the ground, despite growing state backlash against international human rights courts. To date, several bodies of literature have considered these questions, but none have placed nongovernmental activists’ roles in full focus. The international relations and international law scholarship on judicialization of international politics and state compliance often acknowledges but does not thoroughly examine the role of activists in international law. In contrast, a second body of scholarship, on transnational advocacy networks and legal mobilization, often does theorize the role of activists in international and domestic politics but rarely focuses on activism in international human rights courts. While both bodies of literature acknowledge that nonstate actors influence the practice of international human rights courts, they have not proposed an analytical framework that encapsulates the dynamic relationships among nonstate actors, states, and international human rights courts. By proposing a framework on these relationships, we argue that, beyond simply influencing the outcome of a case in an international court, rights activists—whether NGOs or individual cause lawyers—have multiple reverberating effects upon all stages of case development and political impact. We identify and illustrate three fields in which the strategic efforts of activists play out, with significant consequences for courts’ authority over time. These fields are: (1) strategic litigation activity, (2) advocacy to improve states’ implementation of international human rights courts’ jurisprudence, and (3) responses to state backlash. Taken together, these fields can point us to an analytical path to study the practices of rights activists at international courts.