American Convention on Human Rights

Description

The American Convention of Human Rights contains an in-depth analysis and comment on five crucial rights protected under the American Convention on Human Rights in the light of the decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, namely the rights to life, to personal freedom, to personal integrity, to due process of law and to a judicial remedy. Violations of these core rights formed the majority of complaints before the Court at a time when many of the contracting States had either just left, or were still immersed in, a dictatorship. In addition to the analysis of the Inter-American Courts judgments on these rights, the European and the universal jurisprudence have also been taken into consideration; both the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations started their activities much earlier. For the analysis and interpretation of the five core rights use has been made of the travaux prparatoires of the American Convention, mainly to show the lack of professionalism shown by the drafters during the debates and the lack of information in the minutes of the Specialized Convention. This book presents the beginnings of the Inter-American Court and its hesitant steps in developing its position on the five basic rights that constituted the subject of the majority of the cases that reached the Court, along with States in the background attempting to introduce the idea of human rights in a democratic society into their own legal systems. It poses many questions upon which the Court should reflect in future cases and criticizes some of its judgments for their shortcomings and lack of consistency.The American Convention on Human Rights is a scholarly yet practical book on a relatively new system for the protection of human rights. It is a useful tool for practitioners to support their work in this field of law and also a valuable resource for scholars, inviting them to engage in a valuable intellectual, but by all means practical, discussion.About the authorCecilia Medina Chile, 1935 studied legal and social sciences at the University of Chile in Santiago and earned a doctorate in law at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. From 1995 to 2002 she was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, including a period as its chair in 1999-2000. In 2004 she was elected to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, serving as its vice president in 2007 and as its president for the 200809 period the first time a woman has held the office.