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.

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.

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.

A practical tool for legal professionals who wish to strengthen their skills in applying the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in their daily work This is the second and expanded edition of a handbook intended to assist judges, lawyers and prosecutors in taking account of the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (“the European Convention”) – and more particularly of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights – when interpreting and applying codes of criminal procedure and comparable or related legislation. It does so by providing extracts from key rulings of the European Court and the former European Commission of Human Rights that have determined applications complaining about one or more violations of the European Convention in the course of the investigation, prosecution and trial of alleged offences, as well as in the course of appellate and various other proceedings linked to the criminal process.

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.

Confusion about the differences between the Council of Europe (the parent body of the European Court of Human Rights) and the European Union is commonplace amongst the general public. It even affects some lawyers, jurists, social scientists and students. This book will enable the reader to distinguish clearly between those human rights norms which originate in the Council of Europe and those which derive from the EU, vital for anyone interested in human rights in Europe and in the UK as it prepares to leave the EU. The main achievements of relevant institutions include securing minimum standards across the continent as they deal with increasing expansion, complexity, multidimensionality, and interpenetration of their human rights activities. The authors also identify the central challenges, particularly for the UK in the post-Brexit era, where the components of each system need to be carefully distinguished and disentangled.

Prepared by government experts from all 46 member states of the Council of Europe, this publication seeks to help promote a better understanding of the relationship between human fights and environmental issues by setting out details of relevant case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and the principles upon which these judgements are based. These include: the right to life (Article 2), the right to respect for family life (Article 8), the right to a fair trial and access to a court (Article 6) and the right to receive and impart information and ideas (Article 10) of the European Convention on Human Rights.