Scholarship has demonstrated the challenges of using legal institutions to expand rights claims; implementation is difficult and often requires continuous attention by mobilized groups. Yet around the world organizations turn to supranational courts to make claims. Despite the increasing number of studies on human rights courts and how people and organizations mobilize law, we lack a comparative study that explains when and how groups concerned with employment conditions turn to international human rights courts, and what they expect to gain, given difficulties of the translation of claims into law and into practice. The involvement of supranational courts is recent in the employment policy domain; most of the time claims have been left to national courts. This research will generate both quantitative data on the developing case law on labor issues at the European Court of Human Rights and qualitative analyses of two cases of mobilization to assess the efforts concerning employment. The project will assess the hypothesis that organizations turn to courts in particular fields where no other institution is available. In doing so, the project will contribute to understanding of the interplay of institutions in significant policy domains.
This research will produce, analyze, and disseminate the first comprehensive database on labor cases at the European Court of Human Rights, a significant supranational institution yet one that is not well-understood. The database will provide information concerning who mobilizes, what the effects of mobilization are in terms of court outcomes and group claiming, and the expansion of understandings of rights. This cross-national and longitudinal database will be pivotal for researchers seeking to analyze the Court's evolving approach. This timely research will contribute to multiple fields of study and provide social benefits by investigating the consequences of using international human rights law.
