Başak Çalı

Balancing Human Rights? Methodological Problems with Weights, Scales and Proportions

This article takes issue with the argument that human rights are not absolute and should be balanced in relation to competing communal aims. The balancing of qualified human rights is a key practice of the European Court of Human Rights and a great deal depends on a clear analysis of the ramifications of balancing for our understanding of human rights aims. The author does not seek to propose an alternative to balancing, but aims to show that it is not necessarily coherent with human rights principles or the kinds of functions international human rights institutions are thought to perform.

The Legitimacy of Human Rights Courts: A Grounded Interpretivist Analysis of the European Court of Human Rights

This article offers an empirically grounded interpretivist analysis of the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights based on domestic judicial and political elite accounts of the legitimacy of the Court in Turkey, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. The central argument of the article is that the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is based on a constant comparison between the values and goals of domestic institutions and the values and goals of the European Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is grounded in the logic of a fair compromise: What actors think they lose by according legitimacy to the European Court of Human Rights must be balanced by what they perceive to gain in return. Three factors organize how actors in different domestic settings strike a fair compromise in their domestic contexts: a) perception of domestic human rights conditions, b) commitment to cosmopolitan ideals of human rights and international law, and c) commitment to domestic institutions.

Global Governance and Domestic Politics: Fragmented Visions

Global governance is mostly studied as a top-down project. The meaning of the concept is analyzed and investigated from the perspective of a designated concept of the “global.” Such investigations focus rightfully on questions such as “How is the global defined?” “What does it replace?” “How valid is it?” “What and whom does it favor?” or more affirmatively, “How does it work?” and “How can it be done better?” In this chapter, we aim to alter the order of the investigation by focusing on how this influential contemporary Western idea can be understood by exploring its meaning and use in domestic settings. Our study of global governance thus aims to further the exploration of how global governance practices and discourses are produced and materialized in specific contexts.1 Within such a perspective, our focus is to identify and question the types of actors that emerge from the practices of global governance, the ways in which institutionalized power relations emerge amongst these actors, and how global governance practices frame or are reflected in domestic normative orders.

The Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect, and Rebuttal

Introduction 1. Authority and International Law: The State of the Field 2. The Authority of International Law: A Doctrinal Account 3. Minimal Deference and Domestic Political Authority: Beyond Normative Absolutism and International Law Domination 4. Beyond Monism and Dualism: A Reflective Theory of the Authority of International Law Before Domestic Courts 5. The Practical Authority of International Law: An Appraisal Conclusion

Why Do Democracies Comply with Human Rights Judgments? A Comparative Analysis of the UK, Ireland and Germany

Recent literature on compliance has proposed different answers to whether being a democracy matters in fulfilling international commitments. A central focus of these studies was whether democratic institutions enhance or hinder compliance. Scholars have studied both the positive effects of democratic accountability and the negative effects of democratic popular pressure on compliance. Different strands of literature suggest an apparent disagreement about whether democracies are more or less likely to comply with human rights commitments and what reasons motivate their compliance. In this paper, we explore the relationship between democratic institutional qualities and human rights commitments, by employing different methods and new data. We study democracy as a dependent variable rather than an independent variable affecting human rights compliance. We submit that democracies have a number of objective institutional properties, but we also emphasise that institutional properties have different prominence in different contexts. We claim that the ideas that states have of their own democracy play an important role in determining the motivations for compliance with human rights commitments. We focus on reasons for democratic compliance with a particularly institutional form of human rights commitment: human rights judgments and rely on rich qualitative data based on elite interviews carried out in Germany, the UK and Ireland.