The Future of the European Court of Human Rights

Lecturer: Róbert Ragnar Spanó, Judge and Vice-president of the European Court of Human Rights  

27 September 2019, 14:30
ELTE Law Faculty
Room: Faculty Council Room (Egyetem tér 1-3., ground floor)
Registration: anna.racz@ajk.elte.hu

The current era in the life of the European Convention on Human Rights is a transformative one. The speaker, a serving judge of the Strasbourg Court, thus finds it opportune to look back in time, consider the present and reflect on the future. It is argued that the last 40 years or so constituted the Court’s ‘substantive embedding phase’. This phase has now in general shifted towards a new historical era, the ‘procedural embedding phase’, which is analysed in detail. During this latter phase, the Court has begun to realign its project attempting to trigger increased engagement with the Convention by national authorities using a mechanism termed ‘process-based review’. The overall aim is to secure a higher and more sustainable level of Convention protections within the States subject to European supervision. However, within this process-based review mechanism, national decision-makers have to be structurally capable of fulfilling the task of effectively securing human rights. This means that the foundations of the domestic legal order have to be intact. States that do not respect the rule of law cannot expect to be afforded deference under process-based review in the age of subsidiarity.