This course book 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 live in a permanent nostalgia for where they come from: the liberal constitutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they emerged as the Enlightenment’s most visible response to the tyranny of monarchs and to the weight of tradition and prejudice. And, as we shall see, the colonization of international law by human rights perfectly illustrates the formation of a ‘self-contained regime’ – one of those regimes that international lawyers are sometimes tempted to ignore, because they know they cannot be domesticated entirely.

Since the general framework of international human rights law has been built, in the 1960s to the 1980s, a new generation of questions has arisen which focuses more on the effectiveness of that framework and, particularly, on its impact at national level. The role of national authorities is vital in this respect. International human rights can only be effective on the ground, where they really matter, if national courts, parliaments, and governments rely on them, and if civil society mobilizes in order to hold authorities accountable on that basis (see, e.g., D. Beyleveld, ‘The Concept of a Human Right and Incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ (1995) Public Law, 577; C. Heyns and F. Viljoen, The Impact of the United Nations Human Rights Treaties on the Domestic Level (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002); O. Schachter, ‘The Obligation to Implement the Covenant in Domestic Law’, in L. Henkin (ed.), The International Bill of Rights: The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 311; on the role of national courts in applying international human rights, see B. Conforti and F. Francioni (eds.), Enforcing International Human Rights in Domestic Courts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997)).

This chapter reviews a number of questions raised by the protection of human rights at a regional level. It does not offer a systematic treatment of how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been implemented in the regional context; nor does it examine in detail the working methods or case law of regional human rights courts or expert bodies established at regional level. This case law has been presented in Chapters 3–7, which examined the content of States’ obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights without discrimination. In those chapters, the contribution of regional courts or non-judicial bodies has been analysed alongside that of bodies established at the international level in order to describe the content of the emerging jus commune in the field of human rights. As to the overall context, it has been briefly recalled in Chapter 1, section 2, which discussed the role of human rights in the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, and the African Union.