This thesis critically compares how domestic human rights NGOs (DNGOs) in the United States, Britain and Germany use (or mobilise) law to enforce human rights standards and proposes a method to measure their effectiveness in doing so. To do this it draws upon both case studies and literature from many disciplines. On the basis of the data and the literature it finds that, despite their great diversity, DNGOs in each jurisdiction show general similarities in their ???styles??? of operation and use of the law. It also finds that their effectiveness in enforcing human rights can be ascertained with reasonable accuracy and that a DNGO???s size and access to resources does not necessarily correlate with its effectiveness. The context in which the above questions were investigated was one in which there existed very little literature that examined the work of DNGOs (as opposed to international NGOs) as well as few theoretical approaches that would allow their activities to be critically examined and compared. It was also a context in which there was a great deal of discussion in the literature about the crucial importance of DNGOs in human rights enforcement and a growing suspicion that Globalisation might be making their role even more important than it was in the past. To address these issues the author used case studies to supply the necessary detail and a method using ???ideal types??? to assess the data. He also proposed a method to measure DNGO effectiveness so that the case studies could be more thoroughly compared and their true success in human rights enforcement revealed. Despite the incredible diversity among DNGOs the author was able to draw a few useful conclusions about how successful DNGOs operate. In response to these conclusions the author proposed that one possible route by which DNGOs could improve their effectiveness was to transplant their characteristics between jurisdictions. The author also found some evidence that Globalisation was having an effect on DNGOs and proposed some ways in which individual case studies could take advantage of this.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258867 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Calnan, Scott, Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Law |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Scott Calnan, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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