Join us for a presentation of Dr. Dilek Kurban's book Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey's Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
With its contextualised analysis of the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR) engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict since the early 1990s, Limits of Supranational Justice makes a much-needed contribution to scholarships on supranational courts and legal mobilisation. Based on a socio-legal account of the efforts of Kurdish lawyers in mobilising the ECtHR on behalf of abducted, executed, tortured and displaced civilians under emergency rule, and a doctrinal legal analysis of the ECtHR's jurisprudence in these cases, this book powerfully demonstrates the Strasbourg court's failure to end gross violations in the Kurdish region. It brings together legal, political, sociological and historical narratives, and highlights the factors enabling the perpetuation of state violence and political repression against the Kurds. The effectiveness of supranational courts can best be assessed in hard cases such as Turkey, and this book demonstrates the need for a reappraisal of current academic and jurisprudential approaches to authoritarian regimes.
Author
Dilek Kurban is a Fellow and Lecturer at the Hertie School in Berlin. She obtained her PhD from Maastricht University Faculty of Law in 2018. She also holds a Juris Doctor (JD) from Columbia Law School and a Master in International Affairs (MIA) from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her research interests include supranational human rights courts, state violence, legal mobilisation and judicial politics, with a particular focus on authoritarian regimes and a regional focus on Turkey. Kurban’s research is also published in edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Law Review and Columbia Human Rights Law Review. During 2012-2019, as the Turkey expert of the Network of Independent Experts in the Non-Discrimination Field, she reported to the European Commission. Before transitioning to academia, during 2005-2013, she engaged in policy-oriented research at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), most recently as the Director of its Democratisation programme.
Discussant
Alexandra Huneeus is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her scholarship focuses on human rights law, with emphasis on Latin America. Her work stands at the intersection of law, political science, and sociology, and has been published in the American Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Law and Social Inquiry, Yale Journal of International Law, Leiden International Law Journal, and by Cambridge University Press. She received her PhD, JD and BA from University of California, Berkeley, and was a post-doc at Stanford University's Center on Development, Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Chair
Başak Çalı is Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and Co-Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in international law and institutions, international human rights law and policy. She has authored publications on theories of international law, the relationship between international law and domestic law, standards of review in international law, interpretation of human rights law, legitimacy of human rights courts, and implementation of human rights judgments. Çalı is the Chair of European Implementation Network and a Fellow of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex. She has acted as a Council of Europe expert on the European Convention on Human Rights since 2002.
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