CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Kārkliņa, Kate Keita |
|---|---|
| Title | Toward a Transregional Concept of Human Dignity: Tracing the Contours of a Contested Concept in Regional Jurisprudence |
| Summary | The concept of human dignity occupies a central place in international human rights law (IHRL), yet remains contested in meaning. Despite its prominence in legal texts and its status as foundational to the concept of human rights, scholarship has largely examined it within single jurisdictions or through philosophical inquiry, leaving limited engagement with its meaning as a transnational legal concept bridging diverse legal interpretations. Strikingly, the European, Inter-American, and African regional human rights systems remain underexplored in this regard, despite their potential to develop coherent, authoritative regional conceptions that reflect both IHRL and domestic practice. Whether a transregional concept of human dignity exists, one with a shared substantive meaning across the three regional systems, remains uncertain. This uncertainty forms the impetus for this dissertation. Building on prior attempts to conceptualize a transnational legal concept of human dignity, this study adopts three dimensions identified in dignity scholarship as central to such a concept—bodily integrity, equality, and personal autonomy—as its analytical framework for examining regional jurisprudence. It asks to what extent a shared, transregional concept of human dignity can be discerned through judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, as well as decisions of the European Committee of Social Rights, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The study covers judgments and decisions delivered up to 30 April 2024, in which dignity was explicitly invoked in relation to any of these dimensions. The dissertation employs a doctrinal, comparative, and interpretative methodology to trace transregional convergence along doctrinal, conceptual, and normative axes. In doing so, it identifies the normative and functional roles the concept of human dignity plays in connection with the three dimensions and assesses whether the observed shared patterns support the existence of a thin, yet coherent, transregional concept of human dignity. The findings reveal strong doctrinal, conceptual, and normative convergence across all three systems in understanding human dignity as intertwined with bodily integrity, which acquires legal meaning through the absolute prohibition of ill-treatment. In relation to equality, there is substantive conceptual and normative convergence expressed through the principle of non-discrimination, though doctrinal approaches differ: the European system articulates it cautiously through case-specific invocations of dignity, while the Inter-American and African systems articulate it more explicitly as a basis for rights claims. The third dimension—personal autonomy—converges only bi-regionally, since African regional dignity jurisprudence lacks this interpretative strand. The identified transregional concept of human dignity thus encompasses two of the three dimensions, excluding personal autonomy. The findings of this dissertation contribute to the broader inquiry into human dignity as a transnational concept by addressing the lack of comparative clarity in existing scholarship and illuminating the concept’s shared substantive components across regional systems. They further demonstrate how interpretative coherence in regional adjudication can promote a unified yet pluralistic understanding of this foundational concept, and how normative and conceptual stability can be revealed through a bottom-up analysis of judicial practice, thereby offering a replicable methodological approach for examining other contested concepts in IHRL. |
| Supervisor | Böckenförde, Markus |
| Department | Legal Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/karklina_kate.pdf |
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