Publications

Articles, Essays and other Works

Indigenous Rights

• "Indigenous v. Peasant Rights? Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina and the Role of the Inter-American Human Rights System in Inter-Ethnic Communal Conflict, Journal of Human Rights (forthcoming) - with Lorenza Fontana.

The case of Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina involved a land conflict between indigenous and peasant communities. Relying on interviews, this article explains how the court affected the dispute between both ethnic groups.

• "The Right to Direct Budgeting: Using Human Rights to Fund Indigenous Self-Governance", Open Global Rights (2024).

The right to indigenous self-determination requires financial autonomy. This blog entry explains how indigenous communities in Mexico are deploying human rights strategies to secure equitable access to public funds.

• "The Right to Consult Ourselves: The Proactive Function of the Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent", 36 Harvard Human Rights Journal, 147 (2023).

The right to free, prior and informed consent is generally used to protect communities from harm caused by the projects of governments or corporations. This article explains how it can be used to advance indigenous projects.

• "At the Margins of the Indigenous Rights Ecosystem: Underrepresented Struggles for Self-Determination", Harvard Human Rights Journal Online, (2021) - winner of 2021 Winter Writing Competition.

Struggles for indigenous self-determination often emphasize cultural survival and resistance against territorial dispossession. This essay argues that struggles for financial autonomy are also crucial for self-determination.

• "Timeful strategies for Indigenous self-determination: lessons from the Purhépecha", Open Global Rights, (2021).

Indigenous rights are rooted in discourses of historic injustices but their codification imposes strict temporal boundaries. This piece explores a legal strategy that crossed those limits to challenge decisions of a far-gone past.

• "Remarks on the judgment of the Inter-American Court in the Lhaka Honhat vs. Argentina case", Justicia en las Americas, (2020) - with Daniel Cerqueira and Salvador Herencia-Carrasco.

The Lhaka Honhat case was a groundbreaking judgment on indigenous rights. This piece summarizes its relevance within the Inter-American System, especially regarding the enforceability of economic and social rights.

International Human Rights

•"Shared Responsibility: Building a Pathway to Justice for Missing Migrants and Their Families", Harvard International Law Journal, (2023).

Human rights law assumes that each violation is the responsibility of a single State. This article problematizes this assumption and explains how migrant's movements are advancing a framework of shared responsibility.

•"Battling impunity in Mexico: an innovative strategy of international advocacy",Open Global Rights (2018) - with Gabriela Kletzel

The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts-GIEI was an unprecedented body created through the Inter-American System. This piece summarizes how this legal strategy emboldened local mobilization in Mexico.

• "Ayotzinapa La experiencia del Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes", in Derechos Humanos en la Argentina: Informe 2017 (CELS-Siglo XXI, 2018) - with Gabriela Kletzel.

The Ayotzinapa Case had a groundbreaking impact in Mexico. This chapter explains why this international legal strategy was so innovative and summarizes its broader implications for human rights movements in Latin-America.

• "Legal Innovations for Corporate Accountability under International Law: A Critique", Harvard International Law Journal Online, (2016).

Holding corporations accountable for human rights violations has been a long-debated issue. This pieces raises some warnings about some of the ideas set-forward by scholars to improve corporate accountability.

• "International Jurisdiction for Corporate Atrocities: An Interview with Luis Moreno Ocampo", Harvard International Law Journal Online, (2016) - with Luis Moreno Ocampo and Juan Calderon Meza.

Luis Moreno Ocampo was the first prosecutor of the Int'l Criminal Court. In this piece, I interview him about the possibility of using international criminal law to hold corporations accountable for atrocity crimes.

• "The exhaustion of domestic remedies and the notion of an early stage in the case of Brewer Carías. Is the Inter-American human rights system at risk?", 8(2) Mexican Law Review, (2016).

In the Case of Brewer Carias v. Venezuela, the Inter-American Court used unprecedented criteria to declare the partial inadmissibility of the petition. This article makes a critique of this judgement and highlights some of its risks.

Law and Social Movements

• "Poder Judicial y Experimentalismo Democrático: Los Jueces como Catalizadores de Experimentos Institucionales", in Gobernanza, Jueces y Democracia (Cossio Diaz et al, eds; Tirant Lo Blanch, 2022).

The judicialization of politics has led to different theoretical ideas about the democratic function of the judiciary. This chapter argues that one democratic function is for judges to facilitate innovations driven by social movements.

• "La Gobernanza Judicial Desde Abajo: Una Oportunidad para Democratizar la Justicia", in Gobernanza Judicial: Concepto, Retos y Perspectivas (Villanueva, ed; Porrua, 2020)

Judicial systems have become so bureaucratized that they exclude the average citizen. This chapter problematizes this tendency and argues that any attempt to improve judicial governance needs to build a solution from below.

• "El Derecho ante la Conflictividad Social: Limites y Aperturas Posibles", 11 Critica y Resistencias: Revista de Movimientos Sociales 1, (2020) - with Sabrina Villegas and Leticia Gavernet.

The law is an important but imperfect tool for social movements. This essay introduces a special dossier designed to address the ambivalent role that law plays in various contemporary struggles for social justice.

• "El derecho y movimientos sociales: experiencias desde el trabajo jurídico del centro de estudios legales y sociales", 11 Critica y Resistencias: Revista de Movimientos Sociales 96, (2020) - with Gaston Chillier and Diego Morales.

CELS is one of the leading human rights NGOs in Latin-America. In this chapter, I interview the Executive and Legal Director of CELS to reflect back on their decades-long experience in international advocacy.