What Does "Dignity" Mean? Different Meanings in a Jurisprudential Analysis from a Distant Reading

This article is devoted to the problems of execution of a State’s obligations under an international treaty after entry into force of that State’s denunciation of the treaty. The author considers the limits of an international court’s jurisdiction ratione temporis as well as possible options for the execution of international court judgments after the denunciation decision’s entry into force. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights proposed classifying by duration all the violations described in complaints filed against a former party to an international treaty. This approach was accepted by the European Court of Human Rights and used in its recent decision against the Russian Federation. Considering the problem of enforcement of the rulings of regional human rights courts, the author comes to the conclusion that the European system for protection of human rights and freedoms does not offer specific mechanisms for resolving the problem of boycott and non-enforcement of courts’ judgments by a respondent State. At the same time, a mechanism of collective guarantees is used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as the main instrument for enforcement as to former States Parties. The article examines the possibilities of overcoming the crisis in the dialogue between national and international courts by using this mechanism of collective guarantees. The author considers the Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights OC-26/20 on the human rights obligations of a State that has denounced the American Convention on Human Rights. This Advisory Opinion gives participants in the Convention the power to investigate the context and the formal conditions under which the denunciation decision was made at the national level as well as whether this decision followed constitutional procedures which received mixed assessments in the opinions of judges of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, among others. The author also discusses options for preventing denunciation at an early stage, through procedures provided for by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

This article reviews the most important cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights between 2021 and 2023. The Court has introduced important changes in the understanding of legal concepts of Inter-American law that will significantly impact the region. The authors of the article provide an overview of the jurisprudence of the In-ter-American Court of Human Rights on the following range of issues: 1) transitional justice; 2) the right to the protec-tion of human rights and the right to informational self-determination; 3) the right to a healthy environment; 4) the right to freedom of expression; 5) sexual and reproductive rights; and 6) the obligations of businesses to respect hu-man rights irrespective of one’s sexual orientation. It is noted that the right to the protection of human rights and the right to informational self-determination have been recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for the first time. The Court also resolved the issue of the status of human rights defenders by including in this category not only lawyers, but also paralegals, technical and administrative staff, members of the press and political scientists. In ad-dition, the Court has recognized the responsibility of the State for violations of the human right to a healthy environ-ment, as well as specified the State’s obligations in relation to mining activities that may have an impact on the envi-ronment. In decisions on cases involving violations of the right to freedom of expression, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has clarified the special nature of the protection to be guaranteed to journalists, in particular women journalists, and has also pointed out the special obligations of States to protect the rights of indigenous peoples in rela-tion to their access to radio broadcasting. In the authors’ view, these and other landmark decisions presented in this review demonstrate that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is committed to the progressive development of inter-American law. The categories of issues addressed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights presented in this article indicate directions for the evolution of the system of regional human rights protection in the Americas.

This paper presents new empirical research (qualitative/quantitative) on the role of NGO litigation before the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights. It shows that being an expert litigant is correlated significantly to the chances of referral of a case from the Commission to the Court (Kendall tau-b), and more clearly than any other factor on its own. The paper contextualizes the quantitative results within a wider context of the protection of human rights defenders, and concludes that certain NGOs constituted a pre-filter to access to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This guaranteed, on the one hand, quality of representation, but on the other, left out certain issues, countries and victims whose cases were not taken up by the expert litigants. This research is part of a wider project and was submitted and accepted as part of the author's PhD thesis at the University of Essex.

The individual application procedure of the European Convention on Human Rights is well analyzed due to its unique success. However, concentrating on the European complaint instrument bears the risk of a too Eurocentric approach. Individual applications can also be found in the human rights treaties of the Organization of American States and the African Union. This article aims for a comparison of these instruments in order to contribute to a better understanding of institutional and procedural human rights protection. To provide a thorough analysis, it takes a historical, a normative and a de facto perspective. In a normative view on the contemporary institutional and procedural aspects, the European Court of Human Rights stands out by granting direct access to a judicial procedure. However, the contentious jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples Rights is in some respect even broader than the ECHRs due to less restriction being imposed on the admissibility of individual applications. In contrast, proceedings at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights suffer from several deficiencies, for example, with regard to transparency and procedural rights of the applicant. Considering the practical effectiveness of individual applications, the European system clearly serves as a role model, albeit its influence being far more limited in Eastern Europe. Judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have a remarkable implementation rate. In Latin-America as well as in Africa, nevertheless, comparable disadvantageous socio-political factors limit the practical impact of individual applications. Examples are a poor national human rights situation in average, a low level of education and social inequality. The African human rights institutions still need to establish effective individual human rights protection. Yet, contemporary characteristics of individual application procedures are only temporary results of a continuing historical development. Noticeable patterns are found in the way regional human rights systems successively overcome concerns of state sovereignty. In this process, courts and commissions play an important role by progressively interpreting treaty provisions and creating rules of procedure that expand their competences. This gives rise to hope that the »progressive evolution« of the individual application procedure will continue.

These Rules regulate the organization and establish the procedure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

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...

In 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) seminally found self-amnesty laws on serious human rights violations to be null and void. However, later national reactions showed that this supranational control has faced challenges. Such supranational judicial authority has been exercised where amnesty laws and other exemption measures blocked judicial cases, democratic referendums upheld legislation, and peace-making processes existed.This article seeks to determine whether the traditionally interventionist jurisprudence of the IACtHR on amnesty laws/exemption measures has been legitimate under global constitutionalism standards. The standards considered are: human rights, namely, rights of victims of mass atrocities; consistency or coherence of this jurisprudence with international, regional and national practices; and democratic legitimacy and/or accountability considerations.Victim rights have underlain the IACtHR’s jurisprudence on amnesty laws and similar measures. Importantly, developments on victim rights are not exclusive to the IACtHR as case law of other supranational human rights bodies evidences. Among human rights courts and bodies, the IACtHR has exercised the highest level of control over amnesty laws/exemption measures, even nullifying national legislation. However, the IACtHR’s case law shares common principles with UN/regional jurisprudential developments and domestic practices in terms of inadmissibility of amnesties and other exemption measures in cases of serious abuses. Unlike the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the IACtHR has not deferred to sovereign state appreciation (conventionality control doctrine). Nevertheless, the IACtHR has arguably begun to move towards more ‘moderated’ approaches. This is advisable under democratic legitimacy considerations.

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.

Existing literature on the Inter-American Human Rights System generally portrays an evolving transnational community of courts, with domestic apex courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights engaged in a shared and mutually reinforcing enterprise to vindicate rights and curb the arbitrary exercise of state power. This chapter addresses an underexplored relationship which cuts against this harmonious picture—namely, the rather frosty stance of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil towards the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It is argued that this relationship is not only interesting in itself, but highlights the need for further exploration of a number of questions which go to the heart of our understanding of the Inter-American Human Rights System, including the precise requirements of ‘conventionality control’, and the extent to which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudential approach can accommodate opposing domestic positions. These are questions that have global resonance—in Europe, Africa and in world regions contemplating the establishment of regional human rights courts.

In a region rich in natural resources, where miningMining and exploration and exploitation of oil and gas have featured prominently, the Inter-American System of International Protection of Human RightsInter-American System of International Protection of Human Rights has acted as a forum for the settlement of environmental disputes Environmental harm via the gateway of human rights claimsHuman rights claims. It has in this manner contributed, already for decades, to the justiciabilityJusticiability of environmental issues using an evolutive and systemic interpretation of the rights under the American Convention on Human RightsAmerican Convention on Human Rights. This chapter examines the doctrines, contributions, and procedural tools at the disposal of the Inter-American System (with a particular focus on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights)Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as a forum resolving disputes involving environmental matters and providing protection for the environment. The chapter identifies the weaknesses and strengths of the system in dealing with environmental cases and the impact its case law is having on the development of international environmental law. This includes examining the ground-breaking ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion 23Advisory Opinion 23 on Environment and Human Rights, arguably the most significant ruling on environmental issues of any international court to date. It is posited that the Advisory Opinion not only recognises the right to a healthy environmentHealthy environment as fundamental to the existence of humanity, but also that it has the potential to unlock real cross-border remediesRemedies for victims of environmental degradationEnvironmental degradation, including influencing climate change litigationClimate change litigation across the globe. The chapter closes by looking into the emerging jurisprudence after this crucial development, with the first contentious case acknowledging the right to a healthy environmentHealthy environment under the American Convention on Human RightsAmerican Convention on Human Rights (the Lhaka Honhat caseLhaka Honhat case).

Sonia Picado, First Woman Judge On The Inter-American Court of Human Rights Jo M. Pasqualucci (bio) I. Introduction Sonia Picado, the first and only woman judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights [hereinafter the Inter-American Court or Court] has resigned her position on the Court to become the Costa Rican Ambassador to the United States, a position that is statutorily incompatible with a judgeship on the regional court. 1 Judge Picado has dedicated her career to public international law and especially to international human rights law. In 1993, she was awarded one of the prestigious United Nations Human Rights awards for “Extraordinary Efforts in [the] Protection and Promotion of Human Rights.” 2 The honorary award recognized Judge Picado as a “major promoter of human rights in the [Latin American] region.” 3 Judge Picado has made contributions to human rights and to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as both a scholar and a woman. Her presence and her perspective will be missed. [End Page 794] II. Personal Background Sonia Picado was the oldest of three children born to Antonio Picado and Odilie Sotela de Picado. Her father, the youngest magistrate to be named to the Costa Rican Supreme Court, was one of the predominant influences in her life. Antonio Picado, who became well known in Costa Rica for his honesty and his dedication, was the eighth of nine children born to a poor family in a small Costa Rica town. His mother, like so many other Latin American women, struggled to take care of her large family without much help from her husband. When young Antonio won a scholarship to study in the capitol of his province, the town’s people took up a collection to buy him clothes and shoes. The image of her father in his struggle to better himself and to lift his family above poverty had a tremendous effect on Sonia Picado’s life. “He taught me that the least that I could do in life was to try to see that others have the same opportunities that I’ve had.” 4 One of Antonio Picado’s favorite sayings was, “hands that give are always full.” 5 This, according to Sonia Picado, influenced her to give priority to causes that in one form or another could help people. 6 Young Sonia spent two of her formative high school years studying in the United States. At the Holton Arms, an all girls’ school in Washington D.C., 7 she was taught that an academic education is important for women as well as for men. Women’s education at that time in Costa Rica focused on languages, music, and art, rather than basic sciences, history, and courses that would prepare young women to work outside of the home. After completing high school in Washington, Sonia wanted to remain in the United States to complete her university studies, but she complied with her parents’ wishes and returned to Costa Rica. Like many girls in Latin America, Sonia married young and soon had a child. She refused, however, to give up her dream of attending a university. After the birth of her first daughter, she insisted on beginning her university studies in law—an undergraduate degree in Costa Rica. In the 1960s it was very unusual for a woman, especially a married woman, to study at the university. There was only one other woman in Sonia Picado’s class. Although it would have been much more convenient for her to drive to class, her husband would not allow her to go to the university in an [End Page 795] automobile, because it would not be appropriate for a woman. Instead she awoke at 5:00 a.m. to take care of home responsibilities before taking an early bus across town. She studied half time so that she could make a good home for her family. Nevertheless, shortly after the conclusion of her studies, she found herself the divorced mother of two children. Sonia Picado was in the first class of students who voluntarily performed legal services while attending law school. A year of legal assistance in areas such as criminal, labor, and family law has...

Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have struggled to adopt measures of accountability and support for human rights norms since the end of the civil conflicts in the region. Many victims and activists have taken their cases to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to gain reparations and accountability. How effective is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights at advancing human rights norms related to the cases it examines? I examine this question by developing the ‘domestic norm cycle’ theory, which extends Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) norm cycle theory. This theory captures how the ‘internalization’ of a norm takes place by examining political institutions. I argue that we can observe various stages of the ‘domestic norms cycle’ to examine how close or far the state is to fully adopting the norm. Although this article examines the levels of compliance with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, this theory can be applied to examine how external factors influence the development of human rights norms. This study has significant implications for how we observe support for human rights practices.

O objetivo do presente artigo é discutir as transformações no constitucionalismo contemporâneo e o impacto no direito constitucional nacional, notadamente no controle de constitucionalidade das leis, no contexto do transconstitucionalismo e diante da perspectiva do controle de convencionalidade ser utilizado no Brasil, considerando a tensão entre o julgamento da Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental (ADPF) nº 153/DF pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) em 2010 e, no mesmo ano, a decisão da Corte Interamericana no caso Gomes Lund, que condenou o Estado brasileiro por crimes cometidos na Guerrilha do Araguaia. O tema suscita ainda reflexões sobre a influência do direito internacional dos direitos humanos no direito interno e permanece em aberto no Brasil, uma vez que o STF ainda não julgou os embargos de declaração proposto pelo Conselho Federal da OAB na ADPF nº 153 e foi proposta uma nova ADPF, a nº 320/DF, com o intuito de questionar os efeitos da Lei de Anistia de 1979 diante da condenação do Brasil no caso Gomes Lund na Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos e requerer o cumprimento integral dos pontos decisórios da sentença da Corte IDH pelo Estado brasileiro. O trabalho, portanto, utilizará a metodologia crítico-analítica e examinará as novas tendências do constitucionalismo de modo interdisciplinar, com ênfase no direito constitucional, no direito internacional e nos direitos humanos internacionais, bem como nas diretrizes da justiça de transição e do processo de direito à memória e à verdade em curso no país.

Transitional justice refers to the set of judicial and non-judicial measures adopted by different countries in order to confront their dictatorial past. In practice, countries adopt different transitional policies according to their own political, legal, social, historical, and cultural traditions. This applies, for example, to Latin American countries, some of which enacted amnesty laws currently in force, while others tried and convicted those responsible for human rights violations. In this process, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has contributed significantly to the progress of transitional justice. Through its jurisprudence, the Court has enshrined fundamental principles related to transitional justice. In addition, it has helped Latin American countries overcome jurisprudential positions and revoke national laws that contradict international human rights standards. This article examines the contribution of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to the development of transitional justice, with an emphasis on the case of Brazil. Ultimately, it assesses the impact of selected court jurisprudence on Brazil in order to identify the quality of the existing dialogue on transitional justice between the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court.

Aim: To examine different aspects of the evolution and development of the right to life in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Moreover, to analyse certain cases related to the violation of this right and its procedural and substantial aspects. Methodology: The methods chosen for this article are Documental Analysis and Case Study. To conduct the research, the methodological technique of documental investigation will be used. The objectives will be reached through the examination, reading, and critique analysis of the documents. The methodological technique selected allows through the observation and the analysis of documentation to look back, understand, and interpret the current reality. The subject of study is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). The main documents are going to be texts of doctrine about this tribunal and the right to life and the case-law of contentious cases of this Court. Findings: This text establishes theoretical definitions. Furthermore, tries to define the crime of enforced disappearances that have been very important for the development of the right to life in the IACHR and which is a crime against humanity. Other important characteristic of this paper is that it examines the obligation to investigate, the procedural aspect of the right to life, the interpretation of Article 4 of the American Convention of Human Rights (Right to Life) and the proportionality of the use of the force of security forces in relation with the violation of the right to life. Value: To give important concepts about the study of the right to life taking as case study the evolution and development of this right in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.