Domesticating Monitoring of Human Rights through Parliaments

Strengthening the position of parliaments within a complex multi-level human rights system can reduce its democratic deficit and simultaneously enhance its impact where it matters: in individuals' lives. This will require attending to the allocation of authority between national parliaments, executives, and international institutions in the human rights system. ParliRights assesses the allocation of authority in theoretical terms and tests these claims through the study of practice. The key innovation is the ParliRights Principle: a rebuttable presumption that the executive should, on an ongoing basis, to the best of its ability, and in light of the circumstances, act to empower parliament in the area of human rights. ParliRights develops the argument for the principle and its parameters in two related steps. First, from exploration of the theoretical perspectives from constitutional theory, international law, and political science that are available to describe, explain, and guide the relation between national and international levels of human rights protection. Second, from the analysis of how three states - France, Turkey, and the UK - have featured in the creation, operation, and outputs of specific international institutions: the European Court of Human Rights; UN Treaty Bodies (the Convention on the Rights of the Child Committee, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women Committee, and the Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Council. The combination of states and international institutions allows for controlled comparison of the impact that institutional and political context has on the nature, causes, and consequences of empowerment of parliaments on human rights. The comparative analysis will help to determine whether and how the relevance of the ParliRights Principle might vary across states within the Council of Europe.