OUVRAGE : S. Lagoutte, T. Gammeltoft-Hansen, J. Cerone (eds.), Tracing the Roles of Soft Law in Human Rights

Stéphanie LAGOUTTE, Thomas GAMMELTOFT-Hansen, John CERONE

Soft law increasingly shapes and impacts the content of international law in multiple ways, from being a first step in a norm-making process to providing detailed rules and technical standards required for the interpretation and the implementation of treaties. This is especially true in the area of human rights. While relatively few human rights treaties have been adopted at the UN level in the last two decades, the number of declarations, resolutions, conclusions, and principles has grown significantly. In some areas, soft law has come to fill a void in the absence of treaty law, exerting a degree of normative force exceeding its non-binding character. In others areas, soft law has become a battleground for interpretative struggles to expand and limit human rights protection in the context of existing regimes.