Law Commons^™

Treaty Bodies And The Interpretation Of Human Rights, Kerstin Mechlem

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The eight United Nations human rights treaty bodies play an important role in establishing the normative content of human rights and in giving concrete meaning to individual rights and state obligations. Unfortunately, their output often suffers from methodological weaknesses and lack of coherence and analytical rigor, which compromise its legitimacy.

This Article suggests that these deficits could in large part be addressed if the committees applied the customary legal rules of interpretation codified in Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (Vienna Convention), which requires attention to the text, context, and object and purpose …