A Journey Behind the Scenes
Supranational human rights courts represent the apex of global legal accountability. Their judgments shape national policies, influence public perception, and define the boundaries of state conduct. But what lies beneath the polished legal language of these influential decisions?
The book Human Rights Discourse unveils a less explored but fundamentally critical layer: the linguistic and procedural practices that construct the universe of human rights, where law is seen as “a discursive social practice”.
To protect human rights, we must also protect the integrity and inclusivity of the language through which they are claimed.
The book offers a guided journey through the life cycle of a human rights case, primarily within the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), while drawing comparisons with the Inter-American and African Courts. By revealing the linguistic intricacies behind legal decisions, it highlights how language is not merely a medium of justice but a force that shapes its meaning and reach.
Human Rights Discourse(s)
Born against the backdrop of World War II in the 1950s, human rights discourse developed in similar yet distinct directions across different institutional and historical contexts. The three main supranational courts – ECtHR, Inter-American Court (IACtHR), and African Court (ACtHPR) – form distinct discourse communities.
What struck me as curious and fuelled the creation of this book is that these courts share the same foundational principles of protecting human rights, but their internal linguistic and procedural architectures differ significantly. These differences are driven by legal traditions, regional contexts, and institutional multilingualism.
It would be overly simplistic to speak of the human rights discourse as if it were a unified whole. Despite occasional osmosis among institutions, what we witness is the coexistence of multiple human rights discourses – each emerging through specific languages, professional cultures, and legal genres: stable and formalized textual formats shaped by institutional norms and communicative goals. These genres are realized by multiple actors: applicants, lawyers, translators, judges, and administrative staff, each contributing their voice to the evolving discourse(s) of human rights.
Institutions as Discursive Ecosystems
Law is language, as famously declared by both lawyers and linguists. What language makes the law across the human rights courts? Each court operates under its own linguistic regime, ranging from an alternative bilingualism at the ECtHR to the inclusion of “any other African language” at the ACtHPR, potentially making the latter the most multilingual court worldwide. Interestingly, English has emerged as the common thread, becoming a de facto lingua franca of human rights across institutions.
But is English, a substantially common law language, suitable to be applied to these hybrid jurisdictions? In Chapter 2, I propose a tentative taxonomy of the terminological-phraseological continuum of human rights discourse(s), reflecting on how it stems from three main sources:
(1) supranational terms and phrases from treaties and conventions, as well as “jurisprudential creations” crafted by judicial communities;
(2) legal transplants that migrate from national contexts via autonomous interpretations, which may vary across courts, leading to divergent understandings; and
(3) system-bound elements from national legal orders that integrate into human rights discourse, sometimes retaining their original language through translation couplets.
The Application: Language as Gatekeeper to Justice?
Access to supranational justice begins with the application – a deceptively simple form that determines admissibility. At the ECtHR, these forms are now crafted in “plain language”, reflecting a broader trend toward informational justice.
Judgments at the ECtHR are perhaps the most scrutinized texts, but their creation process remains opaque.
This concept prioritizes clarity, accessibility, and the democratization of legal language, especially important in multilingual and multicultural contexts. What makes the ECtHR different from its sister courts in Africa and America is that it allows individual petitioners to access the court directly, having abolished the two-tier system – Commission and then the Court, still active in the ACtHPR and IACtHR – in 1998.
How effective would a right of individual petition be if it required applicants—coming from 46 states of the Council of Europe – to be proficient in legal English or legal French? To make it effective, the ECtHR allows initial claims to be lodged in national languages. This multilingual entry point is crucial for equitable access but also places hefty weight on the role of Registry lawyers, whose work in processing those applications often remains invisible yet decisive.
Translation as Transformation: From National to Supranational
When an application makes it past the initial filtering stage at the ECtHR, it crosses an invisible but pivotal threshold: the case communication phase. This is more than just a procedural step – it marks a transformation in both form and function.
The case shifts from a national complaint, often submitted in the applicant’s native tongue and sometimes written by a layperson, into a supranational legal issue articulated in one of the Court’s official languages – English or French.
At this stage, language becomes both gatekeeper and architect. The case communication is prepared by Registry lawyers and is typically far more concise than the original application. But this goes beyond mere editing. This document serves as the first official reinterpretation (“entextualization”) of the applicant’s claim, filtered through the linguistic and legal norms of an international institution. And here, translation is not a neutral act – it is transformative.
Registry lawyers operate at the frontline of this transformation, becoming uncredited co-authors in the construction of human rights jurisprudence, as their interpretive decisions ripple through to the final judgment.
The Silent Dialogue: Written Pleadings and the Battle of Arguments
Next to the case communication genre, the “dark matter” of human rights discourse comprises the written pleading. Representing the only opportunity parties have to engage directly with the Court on legal and factual matters, these texts remain “occluded” or hidden from public view, yet they form the battleground where legal narratives are crafted and contested.
Language is not a passive vehicle but the architecture of justice itself.
In Chapter 6, I explain how pleadings blend formulaic structures with rhetorical creativity, particularly when non-native speakers of English or French engage with the Court. Parties often draw from previous judgments, using intertextual references and reported speech to bolster their arguments or challenge those of the opposition.
The linguistic challenges are amplified when parties use machine translation, often leading to significant quality issues. This underscores a systemic problem: while translation is central to justice, its quality and human oversight are not always prioritized.
Judgments: A Symphony of Voices or a Codified Standard?
Judgments at the ECtHR are perhaps the most scrutinized texts, but their creation process remains opaque. Chapter 7 provides a behind-the-scenes look into their genesis through the description of drafting and deliberation practices. Using a corpus of over 3 million words, I analyse judgments dealing with the right to a fair trial over 28 years, unveiling patterns that go beyond legal reasoning.
For example, the recurring use of standard phrases – what linguists call “routines” – creates a kind of linguistic precedent. These routines help stabilize the discourse but also raise questions about rigidity versus adaptability in human rights law.
Can the internal institutional conventionalization of discourse wedge a deeper gap across institutions? Questions similar to the above coexist with reflections on the internal drafting process revolving around negotiation, compromise, and linguistic alignment among judges with diverse legal and linguistic backgrounds.
Separate Opinions: When Judges (Politely?) Disagree
A fascinating glimpse into the plurality of legal reasoning, separate opinions are written by judges who wish to express distance, disagreement or misalignment with the majority.
Curiously, separate opinions exist as a separate genre/search category in the ACtHPR and the IACtHR, but not in the ECtHR. Still, I conceptualize them as a standalone genre based on their divergent communicative goal, positioning, style, organization, length and linguistic regime.
Having classified them into dissenting, concurring, and hybrid types, I notice a certain rise in the number of concurring opinions, which invites the question: is the culture of dissent being gradually replaced by the culture of concurrence? I zoom in on the tone of opinions – ranging from polite critique to open sarcasm, providing an overview of the most typical patterns.
The norms governing politeness in judicial discourse are not uniform, instead they appear to be culture-specific. Chapter 8 was written with an applied goal: to raise pragmatic awareness of politeness norms in supranational judicial prose, reflecting on the dichotomy of respectful versus disrespectful dissent, which can be useful for judicial writing curricula.
Beyond Case-Law: Dissemination and Popularization
The effectiveness of supranational courts often hinges on their ability to communicate decisions and maintain public trust. Chapter 9 examines how human rights knowledge travels beyond the courtroom, relying on the strategic use of language, translation and genre. The (r)evolution of law following its digitalization is intrinsically linked to accessibility.
Yet how accessible is legal discourse to a layman? How accessible is supranational case-law to someone not speaking the official language(s) of the Court? The Chapter outlines the overall knowledge dissemination dynamics at the ECtHR through a historical description of different case-law translation initiatives as well as the creation of the Press Service, whose operation plays a key role in shaping public understanding and trust in supranational justice.
Institutional press releases, for instance, are crafted to balance legal precision with readability. The chapter reinterprets the theory of newsworthiness applying it to law for deciding which cases are publicized. These practices also raise the question: could parts of this process be automated in the future? While automation may enhance consistency, it could also dilute the human judgment essential to effective communication.
Language as the Architecture of Justice
This exploration into the linguistic and procedural fabric of human rights courts leads to a powerful realization: language is not a passive vehicle but the architecture of justice itself. Every genre, from the initial application to the press release, is a discursive act that shapes the meaning, legitimacy, and impact of human rights law.
Understanding this process has practical implications. For legal professionals, it offers insights into how arguments are framed and received. For linguists, it reveals the complexity of legal communication in multilingual settings. For policymakers, it emphasizes the need to invest in high-quality translation and clear legal language. And for the general public, it shows that the accessibility of justice begins not just with rights, but with words.
As supranational courts continue to evolve, the tension between standardization and flexibility, between multilingualism and clarity, will only grow. But this book makes one thing clear: to protect human rights, we must also protect the integrity and inclusivity of the language through which they are claimed.
