This introduction lays out the context, scope, theoretical framework, core arguments and structure of the study. It problematises the focus on synergies between environmental protection and human rights in existing literature, and emphasises the importance of retrieving, exploring and critically unpacking the conflicts that underpin this relationship. The analysis introduces the central interrogation of the book: how environmental protection laws can collide with human rights concerns, and how regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide. Several sub-questions unfold from this main interrogation. How do regional human rights courts address, conceive of and frame conflicts with environmental laws, many of which include considerations that are part and parcel of existing human rights? Which conflict-management techniques and argumentative strategies do they employ to settle such trade-offs? And what does this tell us about how the environment is represented, and how its protection is legally justified in relation to human concerns? The summary of the main findings of the book lay bare the importance of the project, the gaps it aims to fill, and how these novel insights reconfigure the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

This first part explores the origins of the relationship between environmentalism and human rights and traces the evolution of this encounter through a historical lens. It analyses how concerns for environmental protection and human rights emerged as distinct aspirations that progressively evolved towards mutual integration into each other’s normative architecture, legal registers and institutional practices. By examining how the framing of the relationship between ‘Man and Nature’ changed over time and how these changes of perception were legally translated in international instruments, judicial decisions and doctrinal accounts, this part of the book thereby sheds light on a major paradigm shift that occurred in the 1960s, when environmental protection began to be framed as intrinsically intertwined with human rights concerns. This shift corresponds to the first explicit references to human rights in environmental instruments. The analysis unpacks how this radical turn in environmentalism was accommodated at three complementary levels: legislative, adjudicative and doctrinal. This produced a dominant account where environmental protection and human rights are viewed as synergistic and mutually reinforcing objectives, in disregard of the conflicts that also underpin this relation. This account thereby contributes to the literature that critically engages with liberal human rights-based approaches to environmental protection.

This concluding chapter summarises the main arguments and findings of the book. It reflects on the multiple rationales and ideals that were mobilised over time to protect the environment, and translates this protection into an actionable legal framework. It examines the motivations and aims invoked to this end and explores what implications the gradual association of environmental protection with human rights in regional human rights jurisprudence had for the representation of the environment and its relation to human concerns. How are environmental concerns conceptualised, consolidated and contested by human rights courts? Which representations of human and non-human relations lie encoded in the ‘universalisation strategies’ that the book reveals? And what are the political effects of the adoption of environmental concerns in the lexicon of human rights? The conclusion interrogates the world-making effects that the articulation of environmental protection in a human rights register generates and questions the latter’s suitability for radical environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Overall, the book informs us about the management of legal conflicts by courts, the strategies they develop to justify their outcomes and the performative role they play in shaping our understanding of the environment–human rights interface.

This chapter provides an overview of key judgments by international courts and tribunals dealing with environmental and human rights protection. It focuses mainly on regional human rights courts to show how environmental protection has been dealt with under these mechanisms. The objective is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental jurisprudence of these judicial mechanisms, but to signal how a specific synergistic and anthropocentric framing of environmental protection emerged in catalytic judgments. A particular narrative of how the protection of the environment would benefit human rights – especially the right to health, to life and to adequate living conditions or family life, as well as the right to private property and the right to (ancestral) land – was produced and consistently re-affirmed through judicial cross-referencing. This was done by pointing out how environmental harms and ecological deterioration and pollution directly hamper human rights, including those of indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. In so doing, courts played a pivotal role in strengthening environmental protection in relation to human concerns, thereby also consolidating a particular representation of how a protected environment serves human interests and needs. A specific anthropocentric and synergistic understanding of the human–environment is thereby enacted and reenforced.

This chapter empirically examines the conditions under which the executive has the capacity to respond to adverse judgments with human rights policy change. I argue that the executivehas greater capacity to adopt, administer, monitor, and enforce human rights policy when policy change is more feasible. Specifically, civil and political rights improvements are more directly within the executive's control than are physical integrity rights improvements. I show that civil and political rights judgments are more strongly associated with human rights gains than physical integrity rights judgments in Europe and the Americas. Beyond the feasibility of policy change, I also argue that the executive has greater capacity to respond to adverse judgments with policy change when the state has access to outside resources. I show that adverse judgments are positively related to respect for rights as the state's creditworthiness (institutional investor credit rating) increases.

In Chapter 6, I argue that regional human rights courts are more likely to deter future human rights abuses when the executive is willing to adopt, administer, monitor, and enforce human rights policy as a result of elite pressure. I argue that there are two types of elites important for generating executive willingness: economic elites and political elites. With respect to economic elites, I show that the executive is more willing to adopt, administer, monitor, and enforce human rights policy following an adverse judgment when the state is vulnerable to a loss of economic benefits, like foreign direct investment. With respect to political elites, I argue that the executive is more likely to adopt comprehensive human rights policy in expectation of national judicial or legislative implementation. I find evidence that national judicial implementation and subsequently executive human rights policy change, is more likely when the national judiciary is powerful. I argue that national legislative implementation of adverse regional court judgments is more likely as the size of the legislative opposition grows. I find limited support for the role of the size of the legislative opposition, and I suggest this may be due to key institutional design features of the legislature.

Chapter 2 develops my theory of regional human rights court deterrence. I begin by defining and explaining regional human rights court deterrence, focusing on two types of deterrence: general and specific. I then discuss two mechanisms of deterrence: prosecutorial and social.The chapter then proceeds by examining the role of the executive in regional court deterrence, specifically the role of the executive in the adoption, administration, monitoring, and enforcement of human rights policy. I argue that human rights policy change is costly for the executive, and as a result, the executive must have the capacity and willingness and respond to adverse regional court judgments with human rights policy change. With respect to capacity, I argue that the executive is more likely to undertake feasible human rights policy changes in response to adverse regional court judgments. I also argue that the executive is more likely to respond to adverse judgments with human rights policy change when the executive has access to outside resources or when the state is fiscally flexible. With respect to willingness, I argue that the executive is more likely to undertake human rights policy change when the executive faces pressure from the mass public, economic elites, or political elites.

Beginning with two examples from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Chapter 1 introduces the motivating puzzle: Why do regional human rights courts sometimes deter future human rights abuses and other times do not? I posit that regional human rights court deterrence is conditional on domestic political factors. I argue that deterrence is more likely when the chief executive has the capacity and willingness to respond to adverse regional court judgments.This chapter then examines three key institutional design features that make regional human rights courts uniquely suited to influence human rights practices, including exclusive membership, mechanism of influence (judgments rather than recommendations), and institutional independence. I then provide a descriptive comparison of the two regional human rights courts examined in the book: the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights and argue that a comparative approach is beneficial for advancing our understanding of regional court deterrence. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the organization of the book.

Chapter 8 concludes by discussing the book's broader implications. I begin by providing a brief summary of my main argument and findings. I then compare the findings across Europe and the Americas and provide possible explanations for the divergent effects. I then turn to the role of regional human rights courts in the international human rights regime. In doing so, I consider the implications of the book's findings for designing effective international human rights institutions as well as the design of regional human rights arrangements. I conclude by highlighting several avenues for future research, including examining general deterrence more carefully, the role of strategic regional judicial behavior, the potential for complementarity or competition among institutions in the international human rights regime, and backlash in the international human rights regime.

This chapter empirically examines the role of executive willingness as a result of mass public pressure in regional human rights court deterrence. More specifically, I show that the executive is more likely to adopt, administer, monitor, and enforce human rights policy following an adverse judgment when executive job security is low. The presence of an adverse Inter-American Court judgment two years prior to an election year is associated with greater respect for rights than the presence of an adverse Inter-American Court judgment two years prior to a nonelection year. I also show that the presence of adverse European Court judgments two years before an election are associated with greater respect for rights when the executive expects to face a competitive election as opposed to a noncompetitive election. I also argue that the mass public may place pressure on the executive not to undertake human rights policy change following an adverse judgment and when states face threats to social and political stability, and I find that the executive is unlikely to forgo the use of repression following an adverse regional court judgment in the face of large social and political threats in society. I conclude by examining the conflicting types of pressure the mass public can place on the executive.

In this final empirical chapter, I show that executive capacity and willingness complement one another in generating executive human rights policy change following adverse regional human rights court judgment. I show that following an adverse European Court judgment, in the face of mass public pressure, executive human rights policy change is likely regardless of the level of executive capacity. However, high-capacity European executives are more willing to engage in human rights policy change as a result of economic elite pressure than low-capacity European executives. With respect to the Americas, I show that executives are more likely to engage in human rights policy change following an adverse Inter-American Court judgment when the executive is highly willing as a result of mass public and political elite pressure, and this effect grows in the presence of high executive capacity. Similarly, following an adverse Inter-American Court judgment, highly capable executives are more likely to make human rights policy changes when the executive is highly willing as opposed to unwilling.