THE INTER-AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CONTEXTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTION: A BRIEF COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF REGIONAL COURTS’ DECISIONS

Regional systems of human rights are part of a complex protective system that also includes national and global instruments. One of the important advantages of regional systems in comparison with global protection instruments of human rights lies in the lower difficulty of those systems in establishing consensus on these rights. Undeniably, the Inter-American and European systems are the most structured and developed and are specific object of analysis in this paper. After a reflection on the construction of the International Law of Human Rights and the Inter-American Human Rights System, this paper presents the empirical research data of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 2006 to 2012. Subsequently, performs a comparison with the judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights in the 2009-2015 period. It is important to register that this article uses, besides specialized literature, a strong comparative approach between American and European Human Rights Systems and, especially, techniques of empirical legal studies with a large number (Large-N) of data. The hypothesis to be tested in this text is that American and European Systems has many peculiarities because of the cultural, legal, and historical circumstances, but a comparative study of those systems is important to understand some common problems and to analyze different ways to deal with the protection of human rights. As will be showed in this paper, the hypothesis is true because, for example, the number of processes is very diverse, but both systems have strong problems in correctly enforcing their decisions.