From Judgment to Justice

Public interest litigation is generally aimed at securing concrete remedies for individual complainants, as well as more general reforms of policy and institutional practice. Such changes are not easily won in even the most developed domestic jurisdictions, so the notion of public interest litigation in international and regional human rights systems may strike some as fanciful. After all, these systems are relatively new, have fewer resources, and rest on less-settled juridical foundations than their domestic counterparts. And yet, the number of cases filed with, and judgments delivered by, such bodies steadily increases. To what end? What is the record of implementation of these decisions? What procedures exist to monitor and promote implementation? And how can these systems be improved? These questions prompted the Open Society Justice Initiative to embark on an extensive study of judicial decisions in the three major regional human rights systems—African (including the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the nascent African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights); American (composed of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights); and European (including the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee of Ministers)—and the United Nations treaty bodies, with a particular focus on the Human Rights Committee. These procedures, established as part of the protective mandates of both the United Nations treaty body system and the regional human rights regimes, have been fueled by the hope that, where a person is unable to obtain redress at the national level, recourse to an international or supranational legal body would compel a state to make good on its human rights obligations.