ABSTRACT
In its report on the fragmentation in international law, the ILC decided not to deal with the issue of institutional fragmentation – the fragmentation of international law brought on by the existence of different institutions dealing with norms that are “normatively equivalent”. This is a study of institutional fragmentation within human rights law; specifically it is an attempt to gauge the extent of fragmentation through the case-law of three courts, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee, focusing on freedom of speech as related to journalists. It compares the texts, scope, tests and justifications of the three human rights conventions and concludes that, at least in this narrow field, the fear of fragmentation is unwarranted, with a large caveat which pertains to the doctrine of the margin of appreciation as practiced by the ECtHR and its “slipperiness”.
