Regional Human Rights Systems from a Comparative Perspective

Conference

Latest since the human rights boost of the 1990’s, the protection of individuals has become a global concern. There are global systems of protecting individual rights, e.g. the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and regional systems, the European Convention on Human Rights or the Arab Charter on Human Rights. However, despite universal reach of human rights, there are still many regional problems, like protection gaps or the lack of enforceability.

The international conference ‘Regional Human Rights Systems from a Comparative Perspective’ in Florence/Italy addressed these problems by looking at regional human rights mechanisms in Europe, America, Africa and the Arab world to identify their achievements in the past but also their weaknesses and the challenges they currently face. While some of the human rights systems are subject to current discussion, there are very few comparative studies of the different systems.

The conference intended to stimulate a discussion to fill this void. It brought together high-level scholars from the fields of human rights law, social and political science to examine four regional systems: the European Convention on Human Rights, the American Charter on Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights. In the next step, they aimed to develop recommendations for global systems based on lessons learned from regional ones, and for regional systems grounded on those learned from each other.