State repression and elite support for international human rights: Evidence from South Korean legislators’ democratization experiences

Regional human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court of Human and People's Rights (ACtHPR) have become popular sites of mobilization for victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home. Besides being platforms for individual remedy, human rights courts increasingly shape social norms and state policy within countries, making them attractive avenues for rights advocates to develop new norms or to push domestic authorities to reform legislation. The judges of these courts can decide, for example, whether same-sex couples have a right to be married, if prisoners have the right to vote or receive HIV/AIDS treatment, or when a state can deport illegal immigrants to a country where they will likely be tortured. As these courts pass their judgments, they often find themselves in conflict with states that are violating human rights of marginalized groups on a large scale and are unwilling to implement international rulings. Although international human rights courts have become increasingly popular venues among victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home, we are only beginning to understand how activists play roles in shaping the development of regional human rights courts' case law—the body of judgments that shapes how judges will make their decisions in the future. We now have plenty of international relations and international legal research on the interactions between states and international courts: how judges in these courts wrestle between deferring to the interests of member state governments whose actions are on trial and sticking closely to the conventions' fundamental yet evolving principles (Alter et al., 2019; Helfer & Voeten, 2014). As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al., 2018; Sandholtz et al., 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon. Without an adequate understanding of the factors shaping activists' engagement with international courts, we risk undervaluing their strategic impact on the expansion of case law, the human rights protection of marginalized groups who cannot find remedies at home, and the domestic implementation of these judgments in an age of state backlash. In this section, we summarize the three papers contained in this symposium and their original contributions to these themes. Over the last decade, dozens of countries have erected legal barriers or started vilifying campaigns to stymie the work of NGOs (Buyse, 2018; Chaudhry, 2022). One tactic in this toolkit is the enactment of burdensome regulation on NGOs that receive funds from foreign donors as they allegedly promote foreign agendas (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013; Dupuy et al., 2021). States that frequently abuse human rights are especially prone to target NGOs that engage in strategic litigation (Hillebrecht, 2019). Most NGOs depend on foreign funding, and NGOs that litigate international cases fall disproportionately in this category, but do funders affect the selection of cases? In “Foreign Agents or Agents of Justice? Private Foundations, NGO Backlash, and International Human Rights Litigation,” Heidi Haddad and Lisa Sundstrom examine the extent to which Western donors, particularly private foundations, have encouraged NGOs in Europe to litigate at the ECtHR as a human rights advocacy strategy. They examine overall patterns of donor funding and NGO litigation records, and look in more detail at the case of Russian NGOs' foreign funding and litigation records. The analysis is extremely timely, as the Russian government's criminalization of independent civil society actors, especially in the human rights field, and their accusation that foreign funding turns NGOs into “foreign agents” have been crucial elements of the Russian regime's autocratization. This claim has also provided fuel for Russia's disenchantment with the ECtHR in recent years, contributing to the assessment of many observers that Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine was the last straw in an inevitable collision course leading to its exit from the Council of Europe. Haddad and Sundstrom debunk the idea that foreign donors are pushing NGOs toward strategies of human rights litigation. Instead, they argue, there is more evidence that NGOs themselves promoted the mechanism of international litigation as a strategy that donors later adopted. This article is a poignant reminder of the advocacy tools that Russian human rights activists and citizens have lost as a result of their government's departure from the Council of Europe, including ECtHR jurisdiction. Yet it also provides insight into the likely roles of foreign donors in other country cases where NGOs are using international court litigation as a human rights advocacy strategy, which is often a target of the ire of national governments, as explored in the next article in the symposium. When states attack human rights NGOs within their borders and/or international human rights courts themselves, how does this affect the willingness of those NGOs to take cases to international courts, and the ways in which they do so? De Silva and Plagis ask this question in their article about state backlash against NGOs in the case of Tanzania and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. A fascinating empirical question they pose is: does state backlash against NGOs increase NGO litigation at international courts (to contest state repression at those courts and use international mechanisms when domestic ones are not available), roughly in line with Keck and Sikkink's famous “boomerang pattern” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), or decrease it due to heightened fear and restricted NGO capabilities that state repression creates? Employing a process-tracing analysis of NGOs' involvement in three cases before the African Court at different stages of the Tanzanian government's backlash against the Court, De Silva and Plagis find that “two-level backlash” by states can result in both phenomena, either promoting or deterring NGO legal mobilization at international human rights courts, depending on certain conditions. The three selected cases concerning the death penalty, the rights of persons with albinism, and the rights of pregnant schoolgirls and mothers, which took place at different time periods, demonstrate a number of patterns of state backlash interacting with NGO strategies. The authors find that domestic-level state backlash deterred domestic NGOs from partnering with international NGOs in litigation, but that such backlash, when it repressed domestic political and legal mobilization opportunities, actually encouraged both Tanzanian and international NGOs to turn to the African Court more frequently to seek remedies. International-level backlash in turn only deterred NGOs from international litigation when such backlash consisted of state efforts to restrict NGOs' ability to engage in litigation, and not when the international backlash was in the form of routine noncompliance with African Court rulings. Importantly, the authors find that NGO responses to state backlash were significantly shaped by their degree of legal consciousness and expertise with the rules, proceedings, and workings of the African Court. Those NGOs with less knowledge and experience were more likely to back away from engaging with the Court under the pressure of state backlash. De Silva and Plagis conclude that “NGOs' persistent human rights advocacy in the face of state backlash is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that they may not be deterred by state backlash initially, but there is a danger that their continued determination to engage in international litigation could prompt governments to engage in even more severe forms of backlash, with critical impacts on international courts and already vulnerable human rights defenders. Rights advocates have a growing menu of institutions and courts available to them. How do activists choose at which institution to lodge their cases in a world where legal remedies have diversified, or as some have argued, fragmented (Koskenniemi & Leino, 2002)? In “What Makes an International Institution Work for Labor Activists? Shaping International Law through Strategic Litigation,” Filiz Kahraman goes beyond the tendency of legal mobilization studies to only examine how activists interact with a single court or institution. Instead, Kahraman opens up how rights advocates imagine which institution is most receptive to their claims. Drawing on a comparative interview study of British and Turkish trade union activists and their legal mobilization campaigns at international courts and quasi-judicial institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), Kahraman examines how activists first probe and then strategically identify which court or international institution is most susceptible to their primary goals of influencing structural reforms and setting new norms. Through this probing process—or dynamic signaling game between courts and litigants—activists push a court's jurisprudence and case law into new issue areas. For instance, at the ECtHR, Turkish trade unionists challenged domestic courts' ruling that public sector workers did not have the right to establish unions, even though the ECtHR had no established case law on labor rights in 1990s. They won the case, with the ECtHR finding that Turkey violated the right of public sector workers to unionize. These cases not only had an impact within Turkey, but over the next decades, similar cases brought by British unionists would spin off the early precedent set by the Turkish legal mobilization efforts. Kahraman argues that they ultimately pushed the ECtHR to recognize the basic trade union rights as fundamental human rights. Kahraman sheds light on the often hidden strategies behind international litigation. Activists litigate not just for the immediate impact on the current case they work on, but how they envision that all the cases they work on may shape norms and domestic structural reforms further in the future. Whether an institution is perceptive of claims lies in the eye of the beholder. Kahraman finds that besides targeting institutions with high compliance rates, they also take cases to institutions with low rates of compliance, especially “if these institutions have extensive judicial authority to create new international norms.” So, it is not the de jure protection set by an international courts, but rather how activists perceive the juridical responsiveness and judicial authority of courts—or, how judges adopt either an activist approach or restraint in response to incoming cases and how willing states are to implement cases of a court, respectively—that determines why activists select certain courts or quasi-judicial institutions (like the ILO). Kahraman gives us new tools to interpret how activists perceive authority and receptiveness and respond to opportunities. Rather than static external legal remedies, courts and quasi-judicial institutions are opportunity structures that are malleable to the strategic vision of the activist or litigant. The articles in this symposium together reveal a number of key overlapping insights. At the broadest level, they demonstrate that activists' behaviors and strategies influence international courts' jurisprudence, politics within states, and the human rights outcomes of everyday citizens—and these influences have often been hidden in our existing canon of research on international courts. In addition, all of these articles show that, while activists may face challenges in their efforts, often including significant backlash from their home state governments, they also continue to retain significant agency through their creative efforts to develop legal strategies and circumvent state repression. Activists perennially innovate: sparking the ideas that inspire donors who fund them; calculating how to continue their litigation work when government actors threaten them; and taking risks in litigation to push courts to expand how they define human rights. However, along with these uplifting conclusions, there are worrying patterns that demand future research. States are increasingly pushing back against the powers of international courts to bind them to costly measures, and as this symposium has shown, national governments often point to activists as contributors to this “problem” of invasive international human rights standards. A growing body of research has tracked how human rights defenders of all kinds globally are under threat from actors like governments and corporations who disagree with their contentious actions. We need more studies that gather comprehensive data and systematically track these threats, specifically with regard to activists who engage in international human rights litigation. We suspect that such activists are likely disproportionately targeted due to the international visibility of their complaints. We also desperately need research into possible innovative responses to these threats to activists—responses from activists, funders, governments of countries that support human rights, and international courts themselves. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the Toxic Crimes Project. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She is the director of the ActinCourts network at UBC and conducts research on legal mobilization by Russian activists.

INTRODUCTION Where human rights violations occur due to extraterritorial action or inaction, regional or even global human rights supervisory bodies could become the main forums to which victims of human rights violations turn in order to obtain appropriate remedies. Hence, African regional mechanisms could offer a framework within which to hold the foreign perpetrator responsible for the transboundary violations of rights of residents of third states. In fact, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission) – the supervisory body of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981 (African Charter), the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa of 2003 (African Women's Protocol), and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Older Persons in Africa of 2016 – has long received complaints involving the extraterritorial reach of states’ human rights obligations. There are discernible trends in the jurisprudence of the African regional system regarding the extraterritorial scope of African Charter guarantees, states’ human rights duties, and the right of individuals and groups to seek and enforce extraterritorial remedies. In a sense, quasi-judicial scrutiny of the extraterritorial reach of human rights and states’ duties has leapfrogged related scholarship. This chapter analyses the concept of extraterritoriality in the field of African human rights law in particular and human rights law in general. The chapter first provides an overview on human rights in Africa (their recognition and relevance). This is followed by a consideration of the extent to which extraterritorial state obligations have been recognised in African regional human rights law. This is discussed in the context of the burgeoning case law of the global and other regional human rights supervisory bodies (sections 5 and 6 below), which provide inspirational sources that the African regional system should draw upon. The recognition of extraterritorial state obligations in international human rights law (with specific focus on the United Nations (UN) system) and other regional human rights law (with specific focus, albeit briefly, on the European and Inter-American systems) provides the context within which the extraterritorial reach of African human rights treaties should be further understood.

Economic Sanctions Against Human Rights Violations

Human rights queryfalse are typically presented in terms of entitlements, correlative duties, claims, “trumps,” and remedies. 1 These framings, which draw principally on law and philosophy, emphasi...

The Nuremberg tribunal was the expression and the beginning of states' recognition of their duty to prosecute genocide and other gross human rights violations. It was a first step towards fulfillin...

This article examines the relationship between international trade and the growth of human rights abuses. It offers dispute resolution, contract law, and a corporate social agreement to resolve these human rights issues. This article aims to present solutions to the growing human rights abuses in international trade because, throughout history, international trade has been a pillar in uniting societies, cultures, and peoples. With the growth of international trade, international trade law also grew. A key feature of the post-Modern era is the infusion of transnational corporations into every element of international society and culture. A direct result of this influence is a drastic rise in international human rights violations where individuals cannot find protection under international human rights laws or foreign domestic courts because such laws and courts do not have jurisdiction over transnational corporations, creating a perpetual cycle of human rights violations in international trade. This article presents a potential option to remedy these violations through alternative dispute resolution, contract law, and a corporate social agreement. This article employs qualitative and comparative research methodologies. The article includes an overview of historical and philosophical literature to establish how international trade and human rights development have consistently been connected. Additionally, the article analyzes international and state laws to delve into the gaps created by modern-day legal precedents to curtail human rights violations in international commercial trade. Through studying human rights violations within the context of international commercial trade and the existing, relevant international law, this article finds that a combination of alternative dispute resolution, contract law, and corporate social offers an innovative approach to resolving human rights issues faced by the international community. The significance of this article is to draw attention to the human rights violations occurring in the post-modern era due to international trade. Specifically, this article aims to present a workable solution to international human rights violations that can be implemented where international law fails to protect individuals in these situations.

Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs in the 1990s Jackie Smith (bio), Ron Pagnucco (bio), and George A. Lopez (bio) I. Introduction This paper summarizes the results of a mailed survey sent to nearly 300 transnational human rights organizations, of which more than half responded. The survey was designed to identify the geographic distributions of human rights organizations, their political activities, their work with international agencies, their organizational structures and resources, their links with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and their definitions of human rights goals. This study is part of a larger project to better understand how the work of transnational human rights NGOs influences global political and social change. [End Page 379] A. Background 1 Research on the development of international human rights law and institutions has identified the crucial role played by nongovernmental agents in defining international human rights norms, developing institutional mechanisms to ensure adherence to international norms, and monitoring national and local human rights practices. In recent years, researchers have made more concerted efforts to understand how NGOs operate and interact with other global actors to promote changes in local and global policies. 2 This research grows in part from the observation that a growing number of NGOs are engaging in international political activities. An increasing number of these groups are organized across national boundaries. This study is directed toward a better understanding of the work being done by transnational human rights NGOs. Much of the existing research on transnational human rights NGOs consists of: case studies of individual organizations working for human rights; 3 comparative studies of a select number of organizations; 4 studies of the work of human rights organizations and institutions in specific countries or regions; 5 and studies of the political processes surrounding human rights standard-setting and enforcement. 6 This study complements previous research [End Page 380] with a systematic survey of the population of transnational human rights NGOs, addressing questions about how these groups are organized and how they seek to influence global human rights work. The survey was intended to help answer, in a systematic way, a series of questions involving the array of transnational human rights NGOs, their locations, resources, structures, and memberships. Special emphasis was placed on the distribution between the Global North and South, and whether these transnational human rights NGOs are mass-based organizations with many individual members or, rather, are comprised largely of small professional staffs. There is an underlying assumption that the structure and the configuration of organizations within the movement will have important consequences for the human rights movement’s goals, strategies, and impacts. In addition, the mandates of these NGOs were compared, with emphasis on the difference in the goals on which these NGOs focus and the categories of rights that are receiving their attention. It will be interesting to see what these differences reveal about the human rights movement. What are the strategies and activities of international human rights NGOs? Is there some kind of specialization or division of labor among them? Do all the groups work with international institutions? How much attention does the human rights movement devote to public education on human rights, standard-setting, implementation, and enforcement? What do the differences in activities tell about the human rights movement? How fragmented and competitive are the NGOs? Is this a diffuse and uncooperative human rights movement, or is there some degree of integration and cooperation? Below follows a description of some of the broad characteristics of international human rights NGOs in an attempt to begin to answer these questions. B. The Survey The survey used in this study was developed in consultation with human rights advocates, scholars of international human rights politics, and researchers familiar with organizational surveys. 7 Several items in the survey [End Page 381] build upon previous studies of national social change organizations such as those John McCarthy has made of US-based organizations working to combat drunken driving 8 and to promote empowerment of the poor. 9 It also builds upon a survey of national and local US-based peace movement organizations 10 and a broad study of US voluntary associations by Dennis Young and colleagues. 11 Relying on previous studies...

Rights Make Might examines why the three most salient minority groups in Japan all expanded their activism since the late 1970s against significant headwinds, and chronicles how global human rights ideas and institutions empowered all three groups to engage in enhanced political activities. It also documents the contributions of the three groups to the expansion of global human rights activities, demonstrating the feedback mechanism from local groups to global institutions. Examining the prehistory of the three groups, it first sets the scene for minority politics in Japan before the 1970s, which featured politically dormant Ainu, an indigenous people in northern Japan; active but unsuccessful Koreans, a stateless colonial legacy group; and active and established Burakumin, a former outcaste group that still faced social discrimination. Against this background, the infusion of global human rights ideas and the opening of international human rights arenas as new venues for contestation transformed minority activists’ movement actorhood, or subjective understanding about their position and entitled rights in Japan, as well as the views of the Japanese public and political establishment toward those groups, thus catalyzing substantial gains for all three groups. Having benefited from global human rights, all three groups also repaid their debt by contributing to the consolidation and expansion of global human rights principles and instruments. Rights Make Might offers a detailed historical and comparative analysis of the co-constitutive relationship between international human rights activities and local politics that contributes to our understanding of international norms, multilateral institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society.

Domestic violence lawmaking intersects global human rights norms and domestic women's movements. Domestic violence is both a global and local phenomenon. The World Bank argues that domestic violence accounts for one in five lost years in women aged 15-44. The costs range from direct expenses such as medical care and social services to productivity and labor market costs to the psychological toll imposed by the intergenerational transmission of violence. The international women's movement and the international human rights conventions have confirmed that violence in the home is neither a private issue nor a cultural practice. Domestic violence was placed on the global agenda as a global epidemic largely due to an explosion of activism by women's rights activists. Bolstered by increasing pressure from international women's human rights advocates, domestic movements demanded the governments make domestic violence lawmaking central to good governance. The explosion of lawmaking around the world on domestic violence makes this clear by establishing state accountability for violence in the home. The positive responsibility of the state inherent in human rights treaties therefore required states to take positive measures to end domestic violence. The concept of state responsibility to include accountability for acts of private individuals is an integral part of the definition of domestic violence as a human rights violation. The concept of state responsibility has expanded to not only direct state action but also a state's systematic failure to act. Despite the weak enforcement of these laws, the law making processes provide women's movements an opportunity to network globally. The transformation of international human rights and transnational idea sharing into domestic violence lawmaking has been defined as one of the most important social movements of our times. Although much more must be done to realize the promise of these laws, countries that are in the process of lawmaking have much to learn from these experiences. In the last decade, many countries in the Asian region have either passed or are in the process of passing national domestic violence laws. Despite the fact that the laws in force are yet to be transformed fully into practice these laws are important benchmarks and integrate some novel elements in domestic violence lawmaking. Although there is little homogeneity in the Asian region in the field of political, economic, social, or cultural development, these laws have the transformative potential to create new standards in an area where women victims of violence are often silenced because of a culture of impunity. The existence of a law provides space for women to claim their right to bodily integrity and security. Many elements of these laws in different parts of Asia are also instructive to other jurisdictions and can resonate between and across the Asian region.

This article identifies some challenges faced by the Brazilian State in eradicating human trafficking. International Human Rights Law is the instrument I adopt as a conceptual paradigm for analysis of the State’s conduct, arguing that Brazilian National Policy implemented since 2008 does not meet the preventative needs, the repression of perpetrators, nor victim protection as proposed by International Human Rights Law. The conduct of State powers shows that human trafficking is still conceived as a criminal offense, rather than as a human rights violation. Existing published Brazilian studies commonly approach human trafficking in terms of criminal law. I analyze it under the umbrella of International Human Rights Law, disassociating human trafficking from an exclusively feminist approach, and describing it in terms of a global human rights violation pattern related to international migration flows. I emphasize some interior legal concepts commonly overlooked by juridical doctrine, such as vulnerability and exploitation, with attention to cultural attitudes that help determine policy.

The current study analyses the behaviours of US state actors in engaging in international human social rights practices. In particular, through citation count analysis, we examine the citation patterns of US federal and state courts in utilising international human rights instruments, such as international human social rights treaties, in facilitating human rights-based education rights. The empirical findings indicate that US federal and state courts are not engaging the global judicial human rights networks in promoting human rights-based education rights as a type of universal human social right. Theoretical and empirical implications are presented in the concluding section.

Over the last decade, many scholars have argued for the enforcement of international human rights norms by the domestic courts. Those claims are largely normative and there are hardly any empirical arguments advanced in support of the normative arguments. This paper presents an empirical study which examines the enforcement of international human rights norms by the Indian Supreme Court between 1997 and 2008; based on the content analysis of its judicial decisions. With specific focus on the Indian Supreme Court, it examines the reasons, justifications and means for referral to international human rights norms between 1997 and 2008. Firstly, it examines the human rights cases in which the Supreme Court refers to international human rights norms. Then, human rights cases are divided into three categories; those involving: 1. Civil and political rights, 2. Economic, social and cultural Rights and 3. Both. Secondly, techniques developed by the Supreme Court of India for the enforcement of international human rights norms in these three categories of cases are explained. The methodology deployed codes the variables aimed at ascertaining the frequency of the enforcement of international human rights norms by the Supreme Court of India, using different techniques between 1997 and 2008. The study finds that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during the years 1997-2008 can be defined as a transitional period, at least when it comes to the enforcement of international human rights norms. The Court has used international human rights norms largely as an interpretative tool, where international human rights norms were taken as a ‘given’ under the international human rights instruments. There are only a few instances where the Court has ‘defined’ what constitute international human rights norms by reading them into customary international law.This paper concludes by suggesting that the Supreme Court of India should take an ‘active,’ informed approach, while referring to international human rights norms, and should enforce international human rights norms by reading them into customary international law where needed; rather than its ‘passive’ approach of referring to international human rights norms for statutory interpretations. The Supreme Court should look at the relationship between international and domestic legal norms as a “co-constitutive, or synergistic,” and should utilize these norms actively as a participant in the dynamic process of developing international law. The Supreme Court must be able to apply customary law on human rights exhaustively and in a fully independent way, in particular, it must be able to verify that the violations of human rights recognized by customary international law are not committed by the executive. While the Supreme Court has been known for its judicial activism, it is time that it is also known for its informed approach and respect towards international human rights norms.

As is well known, different countries may have a different attitude toward the formal rank of international human rights law in domestic legal order. In those countries that qualify the ratified international human rights law merely as statute, the formal rank of international human rights law is often used as an argument against the binding force of international human rights law on domestic constitutional law. Through a comparative analysis between Germany and Taiwan, though, this paper shows that, despite similar determinations on the formal rank of international (human rights) law, the German and the Taiwanese Constitutional Courts have developed quite different views on the normative significance of international human rights law to their domestic constitutional orders. The different constitutional practices in Germany and Taiwan thus not only reflect Taiwan’s unique international status, but also indicate that the formal rank of international human rights law does not have much to do with its normative binding force on domestic constitutional law. Those who use formal rank as an argument against the binding force of international human rights law on constitutional law presuppose the absolute dichotomy of international and domestic law and thereby overlook the potential compatibility between international human rights law and constitutional law. From a human rights perspective, I argue that international human rights law should not be regarded as an “external” law, but rather as a framework order which delegates domestic constitutional orders to concretize international human rights law according to their own needs or interests so as to fulfill their international task of human rights protection on national level. Viewed this way, the determination on the formal rank of international human rights law in domestic legal order matters only because it has to do with the determination of a certain constitutional order on the way in which it concretizes international human rights law.

Effective protection of fundamental human rights is one of the main features of a modern democratic state governed by the rule of law. Non-governmental human rights institutions are an important component of the international human rights protection mechanism, as they operate at the local, regional, national and international levels. The relevance of the study is due to several factors, including: increased attention to human rights in the international legal system, increasing cases of human rights violations in the world, and the lack of effectiveness of national human rights mechanisms. Among other things, the Russian-Ukrainian war is of particular relevance, as the level of human rights violations in the conflict zone is extremely high. In view of this, a comprehensive study of the role of international non-governmental organisations in international human rights mechanisms is clearly relevant. The aim of the work is defining the role of non-governmental organisations in the international human rights protection mechanism and determining the forms of participation of international non-governmental organisations in the protection of human rights at the international level. The methodological basis of the study. In order to achieve this goal, an integrated approach is applied, which determines the use of general and special scientific research methods. In particular, the functional method was used to determine the functions of international non-governmental organisations in the field of human rights protection. The formal legal method was used to analyse the provisions of international legal acts. The systemic-structural method was used to identify the main features of the participation of international non-governmental organisations in the mechanism of human rights protection at the international level. The methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, and analogy were also used to formulate conclusions and proposals. Results. The article examines the role of international non-governmental organisations in the international human rights mechanism. The study covers the results of the activities of international non-governmental organisations Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights First, Interights and other non- governmental organisations that draw the attention of citizens and governments around the world to human rights violations. It is noted that the activities of non-governmental organisations in addressing the issue of human rights protection are effective and have an important impact on the resolution of human rights violations. It is emphasised that the role of international non- governmental organisations is growing in the current context, as their activities have an impact on addressing human rights violations in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Historically, policies aimed at prohibiting and punishing the use of certain drugs have driven the international approach to drug control and dominate the approach of most countries, guided as they are by the three UN drug control conventions and the dominant policy directions emanating from the associated international bodies. Such an approach is usually defended with moralistic portrayals that demonise and dehumanise people who use drugs as representing a ‘social evil’ menacing the health and values of the public and state. Portrayed as less than human, people who use drugs are often excluded from the sphere of human rights concern. These policies, and the accompanying enforcement practices, entrench and exacerbate systemic discrimination against people who use drugs and result in widespread, varied and serious human rights violations. As a result, in high-income and low-income countries across all regions of the world, people who use illegal drugs are often among the most marginalised and stigmatised sectors of society. They are a group that is vulnerable to a wide array of human rights violations, including abusive law enforcement practices, mass incarceration, extrajudicial executions, denial of health services, and, in some countries, execution under legislation that fails to meet international human rights standards. At the level of the United Nations, resolving this situation through established mechanisms is complicated by the inherent contradictions faced by the UN on the question of drugs. On the one hand, the UN is tasked by the international community with promoting and expanding global human rights protections, a core purpose of the organisation since its inception. On the other, it is also the body responsible for promoting and expanding the international drug control regime, the very system that has led to the denial of human rights to people who use drugs. All too often, experience has shown that where these regimes come into conflict, drug prohibition and punishment has been allowed to trump human rights, or at least take human rights off the agenda. The UN system needs to ensure coherence in its policy and programmatic approaches, a coherence that reflects the primacy and centrality of human rights to the rest of its work. In three parts, this report: presents a critical analysis of the UN systems of drug control and human rights, and their relative relationship within overall UN governance, and outlines the basis for the primacy of human rights; highlights the multiple ways in which the enforcement of drug prohibition, the dominant approach of the UN drug control system, leads to a wide and varied range of human rights violations; and sets out recommendations aimed at ‘recalibrating the regime’ to prevent the ongoing subversion of human rights protection in the name of drug control.