Çali: The Legitimacy of International Interpretive Authorities for Human Rights Treaties: An Indirect-Instrumentalist Defense

Başak Çali (Univ. College London - Political Science) has posted The Legitimacy of International Interpretive Authorities for Human Rights Treaties: An Indirect-Instrumentalist Defense. Here's the abstract:

In this paper I aim to defend a view in favor of accepting the international interpretive authority for human rights treaties. This view holds that there are good indirect instrumentalist reasons for starting with a presumption of deference towards international human rights interpretive authorities, be they quasi-judicial bodies or courts at the expenses of domestic interpretive authorities, namely the domestic judiciary, legislature and the executive when making sense of the scope and the application of international human rights law. We should treat questions of who should defer to what interpretations and who should make decisions as ultimately hinging on what institutional practices will, in the long term, promote a non-legitimacy based goal: the promotion of a human rights culture globally. I shall further argue that international interpretive authorities are better placed for furthering this goal because of the background conditions that define the state of human rights protections in the world today: significantly weak human rights protections coupled with underdeveloped human rights jurisprudence overall and risks of parochial interpretation domestically.