Human rights are increasingly described as in crisis. One reason for this is the fact that current accountability mechanisms cannot adequately deal with intricate and multilayered human rights violations that occur in rapidly changing and vastly complex social contexts. Thus, if human rights are to continue to offer a widely accepted framework for thinking about (social) justice, we urgently need to reconstruct the very notion of accountability on which it is pinned, so that better protection is offered.
In spite of a relatively robust legal framework there is a continued reality of human rights violations and rather low degrees of accountability. This iBOF-funded project ‘Future-proofing human rights: Developing thicker forms of accountability’ revisits the questions of what qualifies as a human rights violation, who holds human rights duties and how to actually deliver human rights accountability in the context of pressing and complex challenges. Our particular concern is the disconnect between the formal legal system and the lived experiences of those who suffer harms that could logically be – but are not yet – understood as a human rights violation.
The project’s overarching research question is: How can thicker accountability for human rights violations be achieved, so as to ensure better human rights protection in line with the everyday experience of rights holders? This question breaks down into three sub-questions:
This project adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that allows us to rethink human rights accountability in the face of current challenges. We search for answers to the above questions within, around and beyond human rights law: We do not believe that legal structures can or should be bypassed in the quest for thicker accountability, yet by looking beyond human rights law and even beyond the legal domain, we aim to (also) identify approaches to accountability that (better) capture the experiences and lived realities of rights-holders who have been bypassed by the legal framework altogether. In doing so, we explore different avenues for achieving better human rights protection, which will provide the basis for a more robust conceptualisation of the notion of (human rights) accountability.
The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels and Hasselt.
This project is funded by the Special Research Fund (iBOF/21/031).
