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I. INTRODUCTION
In this article, I engage critically with the idea that compliance rates alone can be used to gauge the effectiveness of an international human rights court. I highlight several conceptual and practical difficulties encountered in trying to measure compliance and in trying to use it to evaluate international human rights courts. Ultimately, I hold that compliance is too narrow an indicator of the impact that these courts have because it looks at the way that rulings affect only one stakeholder in the international adjudicative process: the state. I hold that in order to understand the dynamics through which human rights courts impact realities on the ground, it is important to widen the scope of study to include broader non-compliance impacts that affect or are brought about by other recipients of international rulings, principally the civil society organizations that mobilize around the international adjudicative process and deploy pro-human rights rulings domestically in myriad ways.
Thinking of the impact of human rights courts in this more extensive way allows us to understand why the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the “Inter-American Court”) is experiencing a consistent increase in relevance (as evidenced by increasing use of its individual petitions process against a steady number of states) while the rates of compliance with its rulings remain relatively low. Cases alleging violations of human rights that reach the Inter-American Court are characterized by the important role played by civil society organizations as petitioners, litigants, and amici curiae. After surveying civil society petitioners in cases that reached the Inter-American Court, I discovered a pattern whereby Latin American civil society organizations deployed litigation before the Inter-American System as part of a broader advocacy strategy and once they received a favorable ruling from the Court they were generally very adept at using it to push for domestic pro-human rights change from the bottom up. This finding is supported by recent literature describing nongovernmental organization (NGO) involvement in the Inter-American Human Rights System (“the Inter-American System” or “the System”) and by previously published narratives of strategic litigation before the System. Both the survey and the aforementioned literature bolster my finding that, while compliance is important, the rulings of international human rights courts can have impacts beyond compliance, even in the absence...