Dignity and Autonomy in the Discourse of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Experience Working with a Dictionary of Terms

Abstract

Dignity is one of the central legal concepts in international human rights law. The Inter-American system is part of this reality and, in addition to including the term in its treaties, it is also used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. One of the meanings usually attributed to dignity is its link with autonomy. Here we propose to investigate how the Court refers to dignity as autonomy through the use of the software LIWC-22. In order to measure how much the Court uses the notion of dignity associated with autonomy, we have elaborated a dictionary of associated terms. After validating this dictionary, we used the LIWC-22 software to perform the quantification. This paper focuses on the methodological experience of the construction of categories and the use of technology and, finally, comments on the results.