Accountability in international complaint procedures and the use of interim measures in urgent cases

Eva Rieter

Chapter 23 in Research Handbook on Accountability for Human Rights Violations, 2025, pp 406-427 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the accountability of states in international complaint procedures, while an actual case against them is pending before international adjudicators. Through interim measures they take provisional decisions on a remedy the state must provide pending the case to ensure a meaningful outcome of this complaint procedure. The right of petitioners to request adjudicators to decide on interim measures can be seen as a procedural one, ensuring access to justice, but once granted it provides substantive relief. It concerns a substantive yet an interim remedy. The chapter aims to show three things. Firstly, that the types of situations where interim measures have been issued have been expanded. Moreover, there is an increasing awareness of states, civil society organisations and the international adjudicators themselves, of the need to address structural violations. More situations are deemed to risk irreparable harm and warrant the issuance of interim measures. Secondly, the chapter expands on the argument that interim measures can be characterised as a remedy pending the case. In situations of urgency, interim measures serve as a bridge between substantive norms and remedies, on the one hand, and procedural remedies, on the other. Thirdly, it argues that follow up on interim measures is crucial to the process through which adjudicators hold states to account for their (in)actions pending international litigation. This process does not consist just of deciding on whether criteria for the use of interim measures are met and, if so, what is the substance of the interim measures, but also of actively responding to what the addressee state does, or fails to do, in the face of these interim measures. Therefore, the chapter distinguishes between two accountability stages. One, provisional accountability as expressed in the interim measures themselves and the duty to respect these measures, where adjudicators decide on what is urgent, what is irreparable and what the state is to do, or abstain from doing, pending the case. Two, accountability as the follow-up stage to address disrespect of interim measures, expressed in two formats (a) pending a case; and (b) in subsequent decisions/judgments, as a self-standing and/or aggravated breach.

Keywords: Interim measures; Follow-up; Inter-American; African; Substantive remedies; Procedural remedies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035306923
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