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

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.

List 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.

Product details

• Authors: Karen (University of Texas At Austin School Engle, Engle Karen
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.07.2025
• EAN: 9781009690133
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0969013-3
• No. of pages: 82
• Series: Elements in International Law and Society
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; Human rights & civil liberties law, LAW / International, Public International Law, Law: Human rights and civil liberties, International law: courts and procedures, International courts & procedures