13 Human rights as sources of national and international criminal law For Inquisitive Minds

Mattio argues that in the last few years laws have increasingly become a preferred and often unquestioned means of attempting to enforce human rights. The use of human rights to mandate expanded penalty (intended as the entire “penal field”, including its laws, sanctions, institutions, practices, discourses, and representations) is mostly to be seen in the recent developments of international criminal law and transitional justice, but the phenomenon is also emerging within domestic criminal law (Teitel 2003; Tulken 2011). This paradigmatic shift raises several questions and needs to be examined further. Through the case-study of human trafficking and sexual violence and drawing on discourse analysis and socio-legal theory, the project will investigate legal and discursive practices of domestic and international tribunals, NGOs and policy-makers in order to understand how and why they are increasingly justifying the application of criminal measures by reference to human rights, and what the effects of this tendency might be.


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