ABSTRACT
Up to now, the paradigm human rights dispute has involved, on the one hand, an individual (or an organisation), and on the other, a State. The nature of the complaint has typically taken one of two forms. First, an individual might be complaining that the State has directly violated his or her rights, because an agent of the State has personally done something illegal; a police officer, for example, might have deprived the individual of his or her liberty without proper justification, or a registrar of births might have refused to issue the individual with an altered birth certificate after the individual has had a sex change operation. When this type of direct complaint is dealt with by a court, the process can be described as the vertical application of human rights law, represented as such in Figure 1 below. For present purposes, it does not matter whether the court in question is a national court or an international court – the nature of the dispute remains the same whatever the forum.
