ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the normative bases for claims by civil society organisations (CSOs) that a state is violating human rights. It argues that any attempt by civil society to define and censure state crime in terms of domestic law runs into certain inherent limitations or contradictions which are addressed by turning to international law, to ostensibly universal principles or ‘natural law’, or to a kind of legally pluralist synthesis of the kind that Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’. CSOs used law and other normative frameworks with varying degrees of intellectual sophistication, from simple denunciations of repression grounded in experience to closely reasoned philosophical and political positions which reach perhaps their most refined level among certain Turkish CSOs. Although some CSOs made tactical use of litigation in national and international courts, the law was important chiefly as a rhetorical resource for the censure of state crime.
