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Series:   Elements in International Law and Society

Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court

Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2025

Karen Engle
Karen Engle
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin School of Law

Summary

Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence. This Element uses prison and police abolitionist thought to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court's reliance on punishment and policing threatens to undo earlier European approaches to criminal law and human rights that resonate with abolitionist thought. It also contends that the criminalization approach provides the Court with an alibi for not recognizing or attending to the deeply structural racialized, colonial, sexual, gendered, and homophobic violence in Europe, particularly but not only against Roma communities and Black and Muslim migrants. Encouraging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the Element calls for the ECtHR to pave the way for an abolitionist-oriented turn among human rights courts.
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Keywords

racial justicegender justicehuman rightshate crimesEuropean Court of Human Rights

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Element
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Series: Elements in International Law and Society
Online ISBN: 9781009690157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 03 July 2025

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Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court
  • Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
  • Online ISBN: 9781009690157
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Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court
  • Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
  • Online ISBN: 9781009690157
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Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court
  • Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
  • Online ISBN: 9781009690157
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