Research workshop: Legitimate aims and ulterior purposes in international human rights law
Various - please see below
Notes & Changes
Attendance is free of charge but spaces are limited up to 20 seats in the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights Gilly Leventis Room and requires advance registration on a first come first serve basis. Registered participants will have access to the draft papers presented at this workshop. To register, please email bonavero-events@law.ox.ac.uk with the subject 'Research workshop: Legitimate aims and ulterior purposes in international human rights law'.
The aim of this research workshop is to develop and contribute to comparative scholarship on the interpretation and application of legitimate aims and ulterior purposes in human rights law. Whilst legitimate aims (or grounds) under different human rights treaties and constitutional provisions share many textual similarities (consider, for example, the aim of protecting national security, prevention of crime or protecting the rights of others), the interpretation and application of legitimate aims as well as the standards of judicial review in human rights law vary significantly across legal systems and between rights and freedoms. There is, therefore, an important value in better understanding a) how and why the interpretation of the same legitimate aims and ulterior purposes differ or converge across different systems and b) how individual human rights provisions interact with legitimate aim and ulterior purpose analyses. The workshop papers will consider both horizontal comparisons between regional human rights and UN treaty body systems, and comparisons between international human rights law regimes and domestic legal orders, thereby making a significant contribution to the emerging field of comparative international human rights law.
Draft Programme
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
12.00-12.15 Registration and light sandwich lunch
12.15 Opening of the workshop, prof. Başak Çalı, Head of Research of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights
12.30 ‘To Invent or to Borrow? How the African Commission and Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights have Filled the Gap on Legitimate Restrictions to Freedom of Expression’ (Dr. Elena Abrusci)
13.15 ‘Child Protection as a Legitimate Aim? Comparing the Responses of the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights to LGBTQ+ Rights Backlash’ (Dr. Betül Durmuş)
14.00: ‘Regime Interactions through EU Fundamental Rights Law: (Il-)Legitimate Aims in EU Border Management’ (Dr. Joyce De Connick)
14.45-15.15 Coffee/tea break
15.15: ‘Détournement de Pouvoir à la Strasbourgeoise vs. Détournement de Pouvoir à la Française: One More Reason to Rethink the Predominant Purpose Test under Article 18 ECHR’ (Dr. Katerina Tsampi)
16.00 ‘The Four Horsemen of Illegitimacy? Unveiling the US Supreme Court’s and the ECtHR’s Interpretations of Legitimate Aim Requirements Through a Comparative Categorisation of Illegitimate Aims’ (Tobias Mortier).
16.45 ‘Sanctioning Domestic Judges for Ulterior Purposes: Comparing the Approaches of the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ (Joseph Finnerty)
17.30-18.00 Closing discussion
18.00-18.30 Reception
Speakers
Elena Abrusci is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Brunel University London. Her research focuses on regional human rights systems as well as the impact of technology on human rights. She is the co-convener of the Interest Group on International Human Rights of the European Society of International Law and is the author of Judicial Convergence and Fragmentation in International Human Rights Law (CUP 2022).
Başak Çalı is Professor of International Law at University of Oxford and head of research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is also Professor of International Law and director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School, Berlin. She is the author of Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect and Rebuttal (OUP 2015), editor of International Law for International Relations (OUP 2010), co- editor of Legalisation of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law (Routledge 2006), Migration and the European Convention on Human Rights (OUP 2021), and Secondary Rules of Primary Importance: Standards of Review, Causality, Evidence and Attribution before International Courts and Tribunals (OUP 2022). She is the principle investigator of ‘Deep Impact through Soft Jurisprudence? The Contribution of United Nations Treaty Body Case Law to the Development of International Human Rights Law’ (German Science Council 2023-2026).
Joyce De Coninck is a Max Weber Post-doctoral Fellow, FWO Post-doctoral Researcher and Adjunct Professor Ghent University and NYU. She obtained her doctoral degree from Ghent University in 2021 and was subsequently selected as an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center of New York University in 2021. Her monograph The EU’s Human Rights Responsibility Gap is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (2024). She is the co-convener of the Interest Group on International Human Rights of the European Society of International Law. Her research interests are inter alia the European asylum and migration policy and legal responsibility of international organizations within the (internationally) applicable human rights regimes.
Betül Durmuş is a postdoctoral researcher in international human rights law at the Hertie School’s Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is also Associate Editor for the UN human rights law module of Oxford Reports on International Law. She received her PhD degree in public law in 2022 from Koç University, Turkey.
Joseph Finnerty is a third-year PhD candidate at the Hertie School’s Centre for Fundamental Rights. His research primarily concerns the European Court of Human Rights’ utilisation of Article 18 ECHR to detect and respond to illiberal and authoritarian practices. He qualified as a solicitor in Scotland in 2021 and has taught at the Hertie School, the European Humanities University (Vilnius) and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.
Tobias Mortier is a doctoral researcher at Ghent University, where he currently conducts research into the judicial review of legislative aims. His project, titled ‘Legislating with the best intentions? Judicial review of the legitimacy of the legislator’s aims’, has received funding by from both the Ghent University Special Research Fund (BOF) (2020) and the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) (2021). He is affiliated with the Ghent University Human Rights Centre and ConstitUGent. He is currently one of the managing editors of the Strasbourg Observers blog.
Katerina Tsampi is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the University of Groningen. She was awarded, in 2017, a PhD in Human Rights from the University of Strasbourg, France. Her monograph Le principe de séparation des pouvoirs dans la jurisprudence de la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme was published by Pedone-Paris in 2019. Dr Tsampi is Research Fellow of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health and Athens Public International Law Center (Athens PIL) as well as member of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research (NNHRR). She is founding member and editor of the NNHRR blog, Human Rights Here, and member of the editorial board of the bilingual (French/English) journal Europe of Rights and Liberties/Europe des droits & Libertés. From 2013 until 2017, she was employed as Legal Officer at the Greek National Commission for Human Rights, the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) of Greece. She has been involved in several human rights projects and activities, as an independent researcher, and she is a trainer, qualified through the CoE HELP program.
