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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Maria A. Sanchez, "Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Description: In Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Maria A. Sanchez tackles a central tension in global governance: how international human rights courts balance their mandates with the imperative to respect national sovereignty. Despite having similar mandates, the world's three regional human rights courts—the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights—interpret their authority differently, leading to uneven regional enforcement of global human rights principles.
Dr. Sanchez traces how the geopolitical dynamics of each court's founding moments have manifested in con...