Cultural Narratives in Human Rights Litigation: Legal Argumentation and Social Meaning
Keywords:
Human rights litigation, cultural narratives, legal argumentation, social meaning, qualitative research, legal consciousnessAbstract
This study aimed to explore how cultural narratives are constructed, translated, and strategically mobilized in human rights litigation, and how these narratives shape legal argumentation, institutional interpretation, and social meanings of justice. This qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 24 participants in Tehran, Iran, including lawyers, legal academics, civil society advocates, and individuals with direct or indirect experience of human rights litigation. Participants were selected through purposive and snowball sampling based on their knowledge of or involvement in rights-based legal claims. Interviews continued until theoretical saturation was achieved; saturation was reached after the twenty-first interview, and three additional interviews were conducted to confirm thematic stability. Interviews lasted between 45 and 75 minutes, were audio-recorded with informed consent, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. NVivo software was used for organizing transcripts, coding data, developing categories, and comparing themes across participant groups. Credibility was strengthened through member checking, peer review of codes, reflexive memo-writing, and constant comparison across interviews. Four main categories emerged from the data: cultural translation of rights claims, narrative framing of victimhood and dignity, tension between universal legal norms and local moral vocabularies, and strategic use of social meaning in legal advocacy. Participants described human rights litigation not merely as a technical legal process but as a culturally embedded practice in which legal arguments become persuasive when they are connected to locally intelligible ideas of dignity, honor, harm, family responsibility, fairness, and collective memory. The findings showed that cultural narratives could strengthen litigation by making abstract rights claims socially recognizable, but they could also constrain claimants when courts, lawyers, or institutions relied on stereotypical understandings of culture. The study concludes that cultural narratives play a constitutive role in human rights litigation by shaping how legal harms are named, how rights are justified, and how justice is socially understood. Human rights advocacy should therefore combine doctrinal legal reasoning with culturally sensitive narrative strategies that preserve the universality of rights while making them meaningful within local contexts.
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