The Future of the European Court of Human Rights

Date and time: 27 September 2019; 2:30 pm
Venue: Meeting Room of the Faculty Council

Abstract

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.

About the Speaker

Róbert Ragnar Spanó is an Icelandic-Italian jurist, Judge and Vice-president of the European Court of Human Rights. He was Vice-Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Iceland. He was appointed a Judge to the European Court of Human Rights on 1st November 2013.