In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country's democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court's demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices. Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor's preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court's judgments.

What does compliance with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) look like in states on the spectrum of democratisation? This work provides an in-depth investigation of three such states—Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia— in the wider context of the growing 'implementation crisis' in Europe, and does so through a combined lens of theoretical insights and rich empirical data. The book offers a detailed analysis of the domestic contexts varying from democratising to increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which shape the states’ compliance behaviour, and discusses why and how such states comply with human rights judgments. It puts particular focus on ‘contested’ compliance as a new form of compliance behaviour involving states’ acting in ‘bad faith’ and argues for a revival of the concept of partial compliance. The wider impact that ECtHR judgments have in states on the spectrum of democratisation is also explored.

This insightful book considers how the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is faced with numerous challenges which emanate from authoritarian and populist tendencies arising across its member states. It argues that it is now time to reassess how the ECHR responds to such challenges to the protection of human rights in the light of its historical origins.

Since the turn of the millennium, the European Court of Human Rights has been the transnational setting for a European-wide 'rights revolution'. One of the most remarkable characteristics of the European Convention of Human Rights and its highly acclaimed judicial tribunal in Strasbourg is the extensive obligations of the contracting states to give observable effect to its judgments. Dia Anagnostou explores the domestic execution of the European Court of Human Rights' judgments and dissects the variable patterns of implementation within and across states. She relates how marginalised individuals, civil society and minority actors strategically take recourse in the Strasbourg Court to challenge state laws, policies and practices. These bottom-up dynamics influencing the domestic implementation of human rights have been little explored in the scholarly literature until now. By adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective, Anagnostou goes beyond the existing studies--mainly legal and descriptive--and contributes to the flourishing scholarship on human rights, courts and legal processes, and their consequences for national politics.

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This comprehensive Research Handbook offers an in-depth examination of the most significant factors affecting compliance with international human rights law, which has emerged as one of the key problems in the efforts to promote effective protection of human rights. In particular, it examines the relationships between regional human rights courts and domestic actors and judiciaries.