Since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, over 140 countries have incorporated human rights standards into their legal systems: the resulting jurisprudence from diverse cultural traditions brings new dimensions to concepts first articulated in the 1948 Declaration. Nihal Jayawickrama draws on all available sources to encapsulate the judicial interpretation of human rights law in one ambitious, comprehensive volume. Jayawickrama covers the case law of the superior courts of over eighty countries in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, and the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights monitoring bodies, the European Court of Human Rights, and of the Inter-American system. He analyses the judicial application of human rights law to demonstrate empirically the universality of contemporary human rights norms. This definitive compendium will be essential for legal practitioners, government and non-governmental officials, as well as academics and students of both constitutional law and the international law of human rights.

-The only comprehensive statement of the substantive content of contemporary human rights concepts
-The only book that assembles all the available jurisprudence on human rights law from national, regional and international sources
-The only publication that empirically demonstrates, through an analysis of the judicial application of human rights law, the universality of contemporary human rights norms