The power of translation: rethinking human rights across borders

In our exploration of The Power of Knowledge, we asked EUI academics: What is the most powerful piece of knowledge you have encountered, and how has it transformed your research?

Here, the personal story of Ayako Hatano:

When I was asked what the most powerful piece of knowledge I had encountered was, I found myself returning to a single word: translation.

As a master’s student at New York University, I was writing a paper for Philip Alston’s course on strategic human rights litigation. I was searching for legal mechanisms that could compel states to comply with their international obligations. Instead, I came across the work of anthropologist Sally Engle Merry, whose scholarship offered a different way of understanding how human rights norms travel across borders.

Her argument was deceptively simple. International human rights norms do not travel as finished objects. To become meaningful in a particular society, they must be interpreted and adapted within specific legal, political, and sociocultural contexts. Merry examined this process through the concept of vernacularisation: the translation and adaptation of global human rights norms into locally meaningful terms and practices.

Until then, I had understood international human rights law largely through the lens of compliance. Treaties established international standards, domestic law was expected to implement them, and when states fell short, the question was why they had failed. The idea of translation unsettled this understanding. The distance between international standards and domestic practice was not necessarily a sign of failure. It could also be where the work of making rights meaningful took place, and where their meaning was contested and transformed.

My interest in human rights was rooted in my experience growing up in Japan, where the memory of the Second World War continues to shape public consciousness. Surrounded by reminders of the importance of peace and human dignity, I developed a conviction that fundamental rights should be protected beyond national borders. This conviction led me to study international law. Merry’s work later offered me a new perspective on how these universal aspirations are translated into practice.

That insight became central to my doctoral research on hate speech in Japan. Japan’s response to racist demonstrations targeting ethnic minorities has often examined in light of its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), particularly the requirements concerning racist expression and incitement to racial discrimination. From a compliance perspective, a central question is why Japan has not adopted more comprehensive legal measures to address racist hate speech.

Seen through the lens of translation, however, a more complicated picture emerges. I became interested in how courts, municipal governments, lawmakers, civil society organisations, and affected communities and individuals interpreted and mobilised legal principles through existing legal concepts, constitutional freedoms, and locally grounded understandings of rights.

What emerged was neither a straightforward reproduction of international standards nor their outright rejection. Rather, it was a process through which those standards acquired new meanings within Japan’s particular legal and social context. This changed the questions I asked. Instead of asking only whether domestic law complies with international standards, I began asking who translates those standards, for which audiences, and with what consequences. Who determines what counts as a faithful translation? What becomes visible, and what risks being left behind?

These are not only legal questions. They are social, historical and political ones, and answering them meant learning from anthropology, sociology, history, and politics. I came to see that socio-legal research does more than connect legal theory to empirical reality. By studying law in practice, it can challenge and enrich our understanding of law itself.

That intellectual curiosity also drew me to the European University Institute as a Max Weber Fellow. At the EUI, I have found an environment where questions about the movement and transformation of ideas resonate across disciplinary boundaries. Europe itself offers a rich setting for thinking about translation, as shared legal principles encounter different national traditions, political histories, and social realities. Their implementation involves not simply the transmission of rules, but also interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation.

There is also a personal dimension to this lesson. Working between Japanese, English, and French, between domestic and international law, and across disciplinary boundaries, I find myself constantly engaged in translation. Understanding another legal system or intellectual tradition requires more than finding equivalent words or concepts. It means recognising the histories and assumptions that give them meaning.

Translation, in this sense, requires humility. It reminds us that our own categories are not necessarily universal, and that we can learn from what does not fit neatly within them.

Universal human rights standards matter, but they do not implement themselves. They become meaningful through people who interpret, contest, and carry them into different settings. Sometimes this strengthens the protection of rights; at other times, it reveals limitations and inequalities in how rights are understood.

For me, the power of knowledge lies in recognising this process. What once appeared to be a gap between international law and domestic practice became a richer set of questions about how rights acquire meaning, who shapes that meaning, and whose voices are heard.

Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned is that translation is not merely what happens to knowledge after it crosses borders. It is part of how knowledge itself is made.

Ayako Hatano is a Max Weber Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute and Florence-Geneva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, where her research explored the glocalisation of international human rights law through the case of hate speech in Japan. Her publications address hate speech, international human rights law, and the regulation of online content and platforms. They include “Immigrants and Hate Speech”, in Y. Hassall Kobayashi and S. Takahashi (eds.), Handbook of Global Migration and Japan (Routledge, 2026); “Regulating Online Hate Speech through the Prism of Human Rights Law: The Potential of Localised Content Moderation” (Australian Year Book of International Law, 2023); and “Hate Speech and International Law”, in S. Higaki and Y. Nasu (eds.), Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

This EUIdeas essay is a contribution to the conversations launched at the EUIdeas flagship event themed The Power of Knowledge, held on the occasion of the EUI’s 50th anniversary. The initiative is aimed at reimagining Europe by showing how universities can deploy knowledge to illuminate challenges, inform public debate, and contribute intellectually to the future of our societies.