Regional Human Rights Courts, Remedial Practice, and Structural Obligations: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Remedy to Structural Discrimination

This study focuses on remedies arbitrated by Regional Human Rights Courts as relevant mechanisms of change at the national level and their correlation with structural human rights. This novel concept of human rights describes when a decision of a human rights jurisdictional body imposes structural obligations, aiming to impact the State governmental structures. Through their remedial practice, derived from primary structural obligations, courts can also enunciate structural human rights by awarding guarantees of non-repetition. Those measures, due to their main features (preventive and of general interest), are recognized as relevant mechanisms to tackle repetitive patterns of violations and structural discrimination, by orders such as legislative reform and policy implementation. To verify this connection between structural obligations and remedies, we propose a study on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, known for its expansive approach to remedies, and a qualitative analysis of the landmark decision of the Cotton Field Case (2009). We concluded that although the decision correlated structural gender-based discrimination, remedies, and structural obligations, the Court did not explore its full remedial potential.