We hosted a workshop on May 17, 2017 at the University of British Columbia: “Legal Mobilization and International Courts: NGO and Lawyer Activism in Regional Human Rights Courts”.
This workshop brought together international scholars specialized in “legal mobilization”, from the fields of law, sociology and political science. At our one-day workshop, we explored the contours of case law that is produced at regional human rights courts. The workshop schedule is available here.
Our workshop was held at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, at the University of British Columbia, in tandem with a workshop, “Challenges of Global Rights and Democracy”.
Participants invited to attend both workshops included leading scholars on human rights, women’s rights, Indigenous rights, and democracy, as well as practitioners from relevant NGOs (such as the Russian Justice Initiative, which is one of the NGOs sending case applications most frequently to the ECtHR, especially on violence against women and grave atrocities that occurred during the conflicts in Chechnya).
Workshop Objectives
1. Create a new agenda on the study of legal mobilization before international courts. This research agenda encompasses studies that compare international courts around the world and empirical studies that analyze how local lawyers and NGOs use legal mobilization and international litigation.
2. Plan future collaboration and expand collaboration with other European and North American institutes working on international courts.
3. Develop a plan for publishing a special issue in an international peer-reviewed journal together.
4. Produce a report on the workshop discussions, shared among participants and on the network website, that also sets out the network’s agenda for future research.
