PRESENTATION

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.

The choice of materials seeks to reflect this hybrid character of human rights. The book collects cases, diplomatic documents, or comments. It places these materials into perspective, and it seeks to provide the reader with a robust analytical structure, which should help improve understanding of how they fit within a broader framework. A consistent effort has been made, both in the selection of texts and in the commentary, to highlight the specificity of human rights. For although human rights may have escaped the confines of the territory of domestic constitutions, they have not dissolved fully into international law and in fact, they resist assimilation. International human rights bodies and domestic courts are in constant dialogue with each other.