Este reporte fue
elaborado por Oswaldo Ruiz-Chiriboga.
La casa editorial Intersentia publicó el libro “The American Convention on Human Rights.
Crucial Rights and Their Theory and Practice” (Antwerpen, 2013) escrito por la ex
Presidenta de la Corte IDH, Cecilia Medina Quiroga. La descripción del libro es
la siguiente:
“The American Convention of Human Rights contains
an in-depth analysis and comment on five crucial rights protected under the
American Convention on Human Rights in the light of the decisions of the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, namely the rights to life, to personal
freedom, to personal integrity, to due process of law and to a judicial remedy.
Violations of these core rights formed the majority of complaints before the
Court at a time when many of the contracting States had either just left, or
were still immersed in, a dictatorship. In addition to the analysis of the
Inter-American Court’s judgments on these rights, the European and the
universal jurisprudence have also been taken into consideration; both the
European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations
started their activities much earlier. For the analysis and interpretation of
the five core rights use has been made of the travaux préparatoires of the
American Convention, mainly to show the lack of professionalism shown by the
drafters during the debates and the lack of information in the minutes of the
Specialized Convention.
This book presents the beginnings of the
Inter-American Court and its hesitant steps in developing its position on the
five basic rights that constituted the subject of the majority of the cases
that reached the Court, along with States in the background attempting to
introduce the idea of human rights in a democratic society into their own legal
systems. It poses many questions upon which the Court should reflect in future cases
and criticizes some of its judgments for their shortcomings and lack of
consistency.
The American Convention on Human Rights is
a scholarly yet practical book on a relatively new system for the protection of
human rights. It is a useful tool for practitioners to support their work in
this field of law and also a valuable resource for scholars, inviting them to
engage in a valuable intellectual, but by all means practical, discussion.”
