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.

The European Court of Human Rights has long been part of the most advanced human rights regime in the world. However, the Court has increasingly drawn criticism, with questions raised about its legitimacy and backlog of cases. This book for the first time brings together the critics of the Court and its proponents to debate these issues. The result is a collection which reflects balanced perspectives on the Court's successes and challenges. Judges, academics and policymakers engage constructively with the Court's criticism, developing novel pathways and strategies for the Court to adopt to increase its legitimacy, to amend procedures to reduce the backlog of applications, to improve dialogue with national authorities and courts, and to ensure compliance by member States. The solutions presented seek to ensure the Court's relevance and impact into the future and to promote the effective protection of human rights across Europe. Containing a dynamic mix of high-profile contributors from across Council of Europe member States, this book will appeal to human rights professionals, European policymakers and politicians, law and politics academics and students as well as human rights NGOs.

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.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has been criticized for issuing harsher judgments against developing states than it does against the states of Western Europe. It has also been seen by some observers as issuing increasingly demanding judgments. This paper develops a theory of judicial decision-making that accounts for these trends. In order to obtain higher compliance rates with the judgments that promote its preferences, the ECHR seeks to increase its reputation. The court gains reputation every time a state complies with its judgments, and loses reputation every time a state fails to comply with its judgments. Not every act of compliance has the same effect on the reputation of the court, however. When the judgment is costlier, the court will gain more reputation in the case of compliance. In an effort to build its reputation, in some cases the court will issue the costliest judgment with which it expects the state to comply. Since the ECHR receives high compliance rates, its reputation increases, which leads it to issue costlier judgments. The court restrains itself when facing high-reputation states that can severely damage its reputation by noncompliance or criticism, so it demands more from low-reputation states.

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.

The European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) suffers from the burgeoning caseload and challenges to its authority. This two-pronged crisis undermines the ECtHR’s legitimacy and consequently the functioning of the whole European human rights regime. Domestic courts can serve as welcome allies of the Strasbourg Court. They have a potential to diffuse Convention norms domestically, and therefore prevent and filter many potential human rights violations. Yet, we know very little about how domestic courts actually treat the Strasbourg Court’s rulings. This book brings unique empirical findings on how often, how and with what consequences domestic judges work with the ECtHR’s case law. It moves beyond the narrow concept of compliance and develops a new three-level methodology for analysing the role played by domestic courts in the implementation of ECtHR case law. Moreover, using the example of Czechia, it shifts the attention from Western countries to a more volatile Central and Eastern European region, which has recently witnessed democratic backsliding and backlash against international checks on human rights and the rule of law standards. Looking at a wider social and legal context, this book identifies factors helping transitional countries to adapt to regional human rights regimes. The work will be an essential resource for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of Constitutional law, Politics and Human Rights law. Its global appeal is enhanced by the methodological framework which is applicable in other international systems.

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.