From Rights to Remedies

In 2010 the Open Society Justice Initiative published the report From Judgment to Justice, which concluded that an “implementation crisis” afflicts the regional and international legal bodies charged with protecting human rights.1 This crisis poses a grave threat to the integrity and perceived legitimacy of the regional human rights systems (African, American, and European), the growing number of sub-regional human rights courts, and the U.N. treaty bodies. While these procedures are fueled by the hope that individuals might obtain redress at the international level when their national systems fail them, they are imperiled by the risk that their decisions will be ignored by states unwilling (or unable) to implement them. The report also revealed that few states have effective structures or procedures in place—at the executive, the legislative, or the judicial level—to ensure the swift execution of judgments and that the violations that gave rise to them do not recur. From Rights to Remedies advances these findings to address a crucial element of human rights ligation: the structures and processes by which states execute international decisions, and the strategies advocates can harness to that end.