International Human Rights Law and the Protection of Vulnerable Communities: A Comparative Legal Perspective

Abstrak

The protection of vulnerable communities under international human rights law has emerged as a central concern of contemporary legal scholarship, yet the concept of vulnerability itself remains contested and inconsistently operationalized across jurisdictions and treaty regimes. This study examines how international human rights law constructs, identifies, and protects vulnerable communities through a comparative analysis of universal, regional, and domestic legal frameworks. Drawing on a normative juridical methodology with a comparative-analytical design, the research synthesizes treaty provisions, jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, and domestic constitutional practice across diverse legal traditions. The analysis reveals that vulnerability functions not as a fixed legal category but as a relational and context-dependent construct that adjudicative bodies deploy with varying degrees of methodological consistency. Significant divergence emerges in how regional human rights systems conceptualize vulnerability: the European system tends toward an open-ended, fact-sensitive approach, while the Inter-American system has developed a more explicit doctrine of structural vulnerability linked to historical discrimination and inequality. The African system exhibits a distinctive reparative orientation, evidenced in landmark jurisprudence ordering structural reforms. Domestic courts, meanwhile, frequently interpret international obligations through the lens of local constitutional culture, producing what this study terms "interpretive pluralism"—a pattern in which formal commitment to international standards coexists with substantively divergent outcomes. The study contributes a tripartite analytical framework distinguishing between categorical, contextual, and intersectional approaches to vulnerability, and argues that the absence of a coherent theory of vulnerability undermines the effectiveness of protection regimes. Practical implications for treaty body monitoring, judicial dialogue, and domestic implementation are discussed.