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This chapter focuses on the evolution of treaty-based human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Each of the five courts under consideration insists on its own primacy with respect to the interpretation of charter rights; each considers such interpretations to be binding on all domestic judges; and each holds, or strongly implies, that states are under a duty to incorporate the regional charter as directly enforceable, domestic law with a rank at least above statute. Today, the European and the Inter-American courts take pains to portray their role and function in constitutional terms, a posture the three African regional courts appear to be following. All have adopted proportionality, which the European and Inter-American courts, in particular, have prioritized as an instrument of transnational governance. National trustee courts can and do resist transnational courts; but an increasing number have also held that international human rights—and respect for the jurisprudence of the regional court—are an integral part of their own domestic systems of justice. Today, domestic and treaty-based charters overlap, reflect, and reinforce one another. As important, trustee courts, at both levels, intensively interact with one another on the basis of shared commitment to building the effectiveness of rights protection through the enforcement of the proportionality principle. These facts support the view that, over the past three decades, a global, multi-level, and pluralistic constitutional system has emerged.

This chapter discusses the principal international legal instruments on data privacy. It focuses on international instruments that have been central in shaping national and other international data privacy regimes. These instruments have been drafted within the respective institutional frameworks of the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the European Union, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Economic Community of West African States. The special role of human rights treaties is also described.

Two low-level armed conflicts, Indonesia’s East Timor and Ivory Coast’s post-2010 election crises, provide detailed qualitative evidence of highly structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) engaging in effective civil warpreventing activities in member-states. Highly structured IGOs threatened and sanctioned each of these states and offered (long-term) benefits conditional on successful crisis resolution. The governments were aware of and responded to these IGOs’ concerns, as did the rebels in these respective cases. The early stages of the conflict in Syria in 2011 provide a counterpoint. With Syria’s limited engagement in only few highly structured IGOs, the Syrian government ignored international calls for peace. And, without highly structured IGOs’ counterweight to curtail the government, the rebels saw little reason to stop their armed resistance. The result was a brutal and deadly civil war that continues today.