Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reconsidering human rights from below
- 2 Sites of rights resistance
- 3 Freedom from want revisited from a local perspective: evolution and challenges ahead
- 4 Relevance of human rights in the glocal space of politics: how to enlarge democratic practice beyond state boundaries and build up a peaceful world order
- 5 The local relevance of human rights: a methodological approach
- 6 Ensuring compliance with decisions by international and regional human rights bodies: the case of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
- 7 Building rights-based health movements: lessons from the Peruvian experience
- 8 Defining human rights when economic interests are high: the case of the western Shoshone
- 9 Struggling to localise human rights: the experience of indigenous peoples in Chile
- 10 Enforcing environmental rights under Nigeria's 1999 Constitution: the localisation of human rights in the Niger Delta region
- 11 Conflict resolution through cultural rights and cultural wrongs: the Kosovo example
- 12 Epilogue: widening the perspective on the local relevance of human rights
- Index
- References
6 - Ensuring compliance with decisions by international and regional human rights bodies: the case of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reconsidering human rights from below
- 2 Sites of rights resistance
- 3 Freedom from want revisited from a local perspective: evolution and challenges ahead
- 4 Relevance of human rights in the glocal space of politics: how to enlarge democratic practice beyond state boundaries and build up a peaceful world order
- 5 The local relevance of human rights: a methodological approach
- 6 Ensuring compliance with decisions by international and regional human rights bodies: the case of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
- 7 Building rights-based health movements: lessons from the Peruvian experience
- 8 Defining human rights when economic interests are high: the case of the western Shoshone
- 9 Struggling to localise human rights: the experience of indigenous peoples in Chile
- 10 Enforcing environmental rights under Nigeria's 1999 Constitution: the localisation of human rights in the Niger Delta region
- 11 Conflict resolution through cultural rights and cultural wrongs: the Kosovo example
- 12 Epilogue: widening the perspective on the local relevance of human rights
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
This chapter reflects broadly on the concept of local relevance of human rights in the context of deprivation of liberty, specifically imprisonment, and interrogates the extent to which the concept of local relevance is pertinent in developing prisoners' rights. In particular, this chapter focuses on the issue of compliance with the reporting of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). In that regard, it highlights existing barriers to ensuring compliance and seeks to suggest further potential compliance mechanisms. The chapter begins by contextualising the concept of local relevance within the framework of the international human rights machinery. In so doing, the chapter establishes some of the impediments to successfully appealing to human rights at the local level. It then turns to consider, from a theoretical perspective, some of the compounding difficulties which exist for those deprived of their liberty in making their appeals to human rights succeed. One specific barrier is highlighted. By employing Michel Foucault's critique of disciplinary society, the complicated power relations which govern deprivation of liberty are discussed. Custodial institutions present exceptional challenges and complexities to human rights campaigning at the local level. Prisons, for example, are ‘social fortresses’, characterised by physical and social segregation and, often, public indifference, factors which inevitably complicate the success of local appeals to human rights. The chapter then outlines the procedures and mechanisms of the international system for the protection of prisoners' rights before turning to focus on the work of the CPT and its capabilities in translating ‘the experience of those who suffer grave abuse at the local level into effective but sufficiently flexible global norms and action’. It turns, finally, to consider the potential of the CPT to secure compliance – to filter beyond the level of the state to become useful and relevant for those deprived of their liberty in affecting change.
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- The Local Relevance of Human Rights , pp. 147 - 175Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011