Human Rights

Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence

By Karen Engle
Cambridge University Press July 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781009690126
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
July 2025
Format
Paperback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence. This Element uses prison and police abolitionist thought to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court's reliance on punishment and policing threatens to undo earlier European approaches to criminal law and human rights that resonate with abolitionist thought. It also contends that the criminalization approach provides the Court with an alibi for not recognizing or attending to the deeply structural racialized, colonial, sexual, gendered, and homophobic violence in Europe, particularly but not only against Roma communities and Black and Muslim migrants. Encouraging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the Element calls for the ECtHR to pave the way for an abolitionist-oriented turn among human rights courts.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Human Rights and Abolitionist Movements: Resonances and Dissonances
3. ECtHR Jurisprudence on Gendered and Racialized Violence
4. Sketching the Contours of an Abolitionist Human Rights Court
5. Conclusion
References
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