Activists in International Courts: Theorizing the Roles of Rights Activists between International Human Rights Courts, States, and Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".