Abstract
This chapter introduces the central themes of the book and argues that the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) is activated by political actors and institutions in ways that transcend traditional compliance perspectives and that have the potential to meaningfully alter politics and provoke positive domestic human rights change. The chapter identifies key gaps in existing human rights scholarship, particularly in relation to the IAHRS, and outlines three core perspectives on the System’s impact on human rights. It offers a synthesis of the key findings of the volume, and provides reflections on the future prospects of the System by locating it in its broader global context.
The author is grateful to the following colleagues for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter: Alexandra Huneeus, Courtney Hillebrecht, Ezequiel González-Ocantos and Tom Pegram.
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Notes
- 1.
For similar perspectives in the socio-legal studies literature, see Kapiszewski and Taylor (2013).
- 2.
Hillebrecht (2014), for example, has assessed compliance on this basis and she has captured states’ practices of picking and choosing discrete measures within each ruling, in what she refers to as à la carte compliance.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
The Inter-American Court in particular has also been an active actor in seeking to foster increased interaction with domestic judges through the development of its ‘conventionality control,’ which seeks to expand the role of domestic judiciaries in enforcing the American Convention on Human Rights and the rulings of the Court itself. For more information, see Torelly in this volume.
- 6.
Such challenges in balancing supranational supervision and domestic policy preferences have been evident in, for example, the Court’s deliberations in relation to the applicability (or otherwise) of domestic reparation programmes, the rule of exhaustion of domestic remedies, and decisions handed down by domestic courts regarding reparations.
- 7.
See the webpage of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) set up by the Inter-American Commission to investigate the Ayotzinapa disappearances for background: http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/activities/giei.asp
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Engstrom, P. (2019). Introduction: Rethinking the Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System. In: Engstrom, P. (eds) The Inter-American Human Rights System. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89459-1_1
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