Strategizing for Compliance: The Evolution of a Compliance Phase of Inter-American Court Litigation and the Strategic Imperative for Victims' Representatives

For decades, international law and relations scholars have debated why nations comply, when they do, with international law. In recent years, the international human rights community has become increasingly interested in the process by which States can be compelled to comply. In the inter-American System for human rights protection, a particularly notable development has been the evolution of a compliance phase of litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The importance of this rapidly growing body of jurisprudence has not been lost on international relations and law scholars, who have seized on these orders as potential windows into the tendencies of states to comply with human rights obligations. However, despite the potential of this compliance jurisprudence to aid inter-American litigants in understanding the viability of their litigation initiatives and improving their chances of achieving their desired outcomes, it has been underutilized for this purpose. This article provides a comprehensive review of the Court’s compliance jurisprudence by developing a typology of the Court’s reparations and systematizing all available information on the implementation of those reparations. By culling more than 90 experiences with implementation and providing both quantitative and qualitative analysis of these experiences, this article highlights the predictive potential of this body of jurisprudence. This article argues that compliance jurisprudence can help representatives to reflect on the potential impact of their work, and to take deliberate, strategic steps to maximize that impact at each stage of a litigation project.