Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

The first meeting of the class will be on Monday, October 25, 2010.

This course offers a trajectory through the regime of international human rights law - its rules, institutions, and processes. It does not confine itself to the international dimension, however. Although human rights have migrated to international law since the Second World War, they have their source in the liberal constitutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they remain to a large extent indebted to these origins. As a result, they occupy a specific position in international law, offering a perfect illustration of the formation of a 'self-contained regime'within the international legal order.

The choice of materials seeks to reflect this hybrid character of human rights. We will examine cases, diplomatic documents, briefs from non-governmental organisations, and doctrinal comments. We will replace these materials into perspective, and provide them with a robust analytical structure, which should help improve understanding of how they fit within a broader framework. A consistent effort will be made to highlight the specificity of human rights. For although human rights may have escaped the confines of the territory of domestic constitutions, they have not dissolved fully into international law and they resist, in fact, assimilation. International human rights bodies and domestic courts are in constant dialogue with each other. International human rights courts are under the permanent temptation to mutate into constitutional courts. The domestic judge in turn tends to aggrandize his or her power in the name of bringing home values that are universal and rules that are supranational - but, by invoking international law, the domestic judge also transforms it into something else, that is better suited to the regulation of the relationships between the State and the individual or between individuals, than to the relationships among States. All this combines to form a unique human rights grammar which this course seeks to bring to light. Because this grammar is best illustrated by comparing international jurisprudence with the treatment of human rights arguments before national authorities - in particular judicial authorities - we will rely extensively on comparative material to illustrate the theoretical framework proposed. Thus, while most of the cases examined originate from the Human Rights Committee, from other UN human rights treaty bodies, and from regional courts (particularly the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights), a significant proportion also originates from the United Kingdom House of Lords, the Canadian Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court, and some other domestic jurisdictions. All these courts contribute to the development of the common law of human rights, and although the focus of this course is on the international dimension, it is this common law that the course is really about.

The final grade will be based on class participation (30%) and a take-home exam (70%).