Alexandra Huneeus, The Making of Regional Human Rights, 119 Am. J. Int'l L. 826 (2025) (reviewing Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, The 3 Regional Human Rights Courts in Context: Justice That Cannot Be Taken for Granted (2024); Alec Stone Sweet & Wayne Sandholt, The Law and Politics of International Human Rights Courts: The Dilemma of Effectiveness (2024); and Carlos Ayala Corao, Hacia una Justicia Constitucional Internacional de los Derechos Humanos (La internacionalizaci´on de las constituciones y la constitucionalizaci´on de los tratados) (2024)).
On July 3, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ( IACtHR) issued an advisory opinion (AO) on human rights and the climate emergency. During an activist-led panel held the next morning, speakers praised the AO as “perhaps the most important document to emerge from an international court;” and “destined to become one of the most important judicial documents in the history of law.” No one minded the superlatives. This moment was the culmination of a years-long transnational campaign. Rights activists had not only conceived the idea of an AO request but also lobbied for it and ghost-written the request ultimately submitted by Chile and Colombia. Through amicus briefs and oral argument, they then armed the Court with a global arsenal of jurisprudence, soft law, and scholarly writing that has, over the past decade, articulated a link between climate change and human rights law. Now, just hours after the Court rewarded their efforts with the most progressive international judicial statement yet, panelists plotted how to leverage the AO through lawsuits, committee hearings, reports, lobbying, seminars, and journal articles. It is not uncommon for civil society actors to help orchestrate the work of a human rights court. Scholars have shown the important role played by transnational activists in shaping international human rights law. Yet the vignette above serves as a foil for the books on under review here. Like the panel, they are a celebration of the rise and creativity of regional human rights adjudication, showing how the practice of human rights has been transformed by judicialization. Each of these books offers an exploration of the law and politics of regional human rights courts, at times to draw lessons from the variation or convergence among them, and at times to view their work together as a single system. Collectively they show how courts leverage case law to broaden their authority and underscore the importance of judicial dialogue in regional rights regimes. They construct a compelling narrative of judicial innovation and doctrinal convergence.
For all three, and in different ways, however, the emphasis on judicial interpretation causes them to sideline important elements of international human rights adjudication. As the example of the AO shows, civil society and other non-judicial actors, including each courts’ respective commission, are also drivers of the development of rights systems and their jurisprudence, but only Laurence Burgogne-Larsen ever centers them, and she does so without theorizing their role in shaping judicial interpretation. The books, in other words, could be characterized, at different points and to varying levels, as court-centric. Additionally, the emphasis on judicial actors leaves us with a limited perspective on the future of human rights in a geopolitical environment increasingly hostile to international adjudication.
It is a luxury to be able to offer such a critique. Until the publication of these books, there were few solid works that engaged the three regional human rights courts at a time. The African courts in particular have been too little studied in comparative light. Read together, the books—like the courts themselves—are a study in variations on a theme. The authors write from three different continents, in three different languages, and from distinct professional identities: social scientists; high court judge; activist lawyer (the authors are also professors). Each book asks slightly different questions of the courts, draws from different sources, and speaks within a distinct scholarly literature. In the scope of one year, these books have transformed the literature on regional human rights. Through their omissions, they inadvertently point to what the next steps in the scholarship should be.
