The European Court of Human Rights

HeadlineDomestic implementation of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, and their impact upon national laws, policies and institutions.BlurbSince the turn of the millenium, the European Court of Human Rights has been the transnational setting for a European-wide 'rights revolution'. An unprecedented expansion of its case load, along with arguably high levels of compliance with its judgments, testify to its growing authority and perceived effectiveness, akin to Europe's constitutional court in human rights matters. Despite its significance as such, the effects of judgments on national laws, policies and institutions have been little explored. By adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective, this volume seeks to fill a gap, going beyond the existing, mainly legal and descriptive scholarship. Some of the pertinent questions it asks are: Do national authorities implement Court judgments and what is their impact on national laws, policies and practices? How and why do different and less privileged social actors mobilise the human rights norms contained in the Convention and in the Court's case law? Does this case law influence rights-expansive policy reform? More broadly, the book aims to contribute to a flourishing scholarship on human rights, courts and legal processes, and their consequences for national politics. Key Features:INTERDISCIPLINARY - Adopts an interdisciplinary approach from law, politics and sociology that goes beyond the mainly legal genre of scholarship on the subject; sheds light to the multifaceted ways in which the ECHR system and its Strasbourg-based judicial arm penetrate and interact with national legal and political ordersNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE - Covers eight country-based case studies on state implementation and domestic impact of the ECtHR judgements in a wide array of case law ranging from property legislation, fair trial and other aspects of the judicial system, to the protection of civil liberties such as family or private life and religious freedom, among others FOCUS ON DISADVANTAGED SOCIAL ACTORS - Explores how and why various disadvantaged or vulnerable social actors take recourse to the ECtHR to pursue different rights claims vis-a-vis states, and the extent and conditions under which the respective judgments influence rights-expansive legal and policy reform domesticallyINSTITUTIONAL IMPLEMENTATION AND SOCIAL MOBILISATION - Combines a top-down perspective of the official institutions and actors involved in the national implementation of the ECtHR's judgements, with an interest in the bottom-up processes of mobilisation of Convention rights in the ECtHR by a variety of individual and social actors in pursuit of policy and political-social changeANALYTIC AND NOT MERELY DESCRIPTIVE - Does not merely describe the configuration of national-level structures and actors responsible for the implementation of the ECtHR's case law and measures adopted by authorities in response to adverse judgments; it furthermore probes into the variable responses of national authorities to different kinds of judgments and rights issues and seeks to identify and analyse the factors and conditions that influence variable patterns of domestic implementation and legal or policy reform.Keywords Human rights; legal mobilisation; courts and politics; European integration; European Convention of Human Rights; minorities