Interstate complaints before judicial or quasi-judicial bodies to guarantee human rights: A useful mechanism in crisis situations?

Abstract

As an expression of the erga omnes nature of the legal obligations regarding the protection of human rights, many human rights treaties that establish bodies of experts allow the States Parties to make a complaint before those bodies against other Parties that don’t comply with the conventional obligations therein. Such interstate complaints are a hybrid mechanism aiming at supervising the application of the treaty, to solve controversies among States Parties and/or to prevent those controversies. In practice, however, interstate complaints are very rarely filed, mainly due to their high political component that makes them be considered an unfriendly act. Despite such infrequent use, it is somehow surprising that most of the complaints filed up to date have regarded exceptional situations that qualify as “crisis”, what seems to highlight that this mechanism could be particularly useful to address violations of human rights committed in times of exceptionality.