Mobilizing supranational courts in authoritarian and violent contexts: Kurdish lawyers before the European Court of Human Rights

Dilek Kurban

Chapter 13 in Research Handbook on Law, Movements and Social Change, 2023, pp 197-210 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The case of Kurdish legal mobilization at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) raises a dual puzzle. If the ECtHR is the world’s ‘most effective international human rights tribunal’, why has it been increasingly non-receptive to victims of state violence? Why do Kurdish lawyers continue to seek justice in Strasbourg? More generally, what are the constraints facing legal activists in mobilizing supranational human rights courts against authoritarian regimes engaged in state violence? Where such violence occurs in the context of an armed conflict and the government resorts to counter-terrorism defense, ‘how, why, and how effectively’ does a social movement mobilize international human rights law? This chapter uses extensive field research to build on a burgeoning recent literature adapting the legal mobilization literature to authoritarian contexts. The chapter advances this scholarship by, first, shifting the focus from domestic legal systems to supranational courts and, second, extending the scope of analysis from legal repression to state violence, which raises distinct hurdles to mobilizing in and against authoritarian regimes. Third, it illustrates the particular challenges posed by violent ethno-political conflicts.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781789907674.00021 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19296_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().