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The European Court of Human Rights under scrutiny: explaining variation in non-compliance judgments

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Since 1959, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) can issue judgments against member states of the Council of Europe that violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The number of non-compliance judgments of the Court varies considerably. Some states have been found to violate rules more than 2000 times, while the number of non-compliance judgments is in the single digits for others. Since we know a lot about (non-)compliance in the EU, but not much about the same phenomenon in other regional organizations, this article examines why some countries receive more ECHR judgments than others. Powerful countries, states with limited administrative capacities, and countries without active civil societies tend to have higher shares of ECHR non-compliance judgments. Moreover, the paper argues that under conditions of low legalization, autocratic countries are more likely to block cases from turning into ECHR judgments than countries with higher democracy scores.

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Notes

  1. Exceptions include Helfer and Slaughter, Brummer, Hafner-Burton, and Jordan, who examine the effectiveness of the European human rights regime and who focus on the impact of and interplay between specific individual rights and the CoE/its member states, respectively (Helfer and Slaughter 1998; Jordan 2003; Brummer 2010; Hafner-Burton 2012), or Voeten who studies the appointment patterns of judges and their judicial independence (Voeten 2007, 2008). Simmons and Cichowski shed light on human rights and study how democratic participation and social mobilization impact states compliance with human rights and its implications for the ECHR (Cichowski 2006; Simmons 2009), while Hillebrecht how states comply with ECHR judgments and how this induces domestic change (Hillebrecht 2014).

  2. For this reason, the European Commission on Human Rights was dissolved in 1998.

  3. This is the longest period of observation for which the data are available under http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng (accessed in October 2016). The year 2016 was not included as the data have not been available for the entire year at the point of data collection.

  4. C.f. Fisher (1981), Mitchell (1994), Tallberg and Christer (1998), Underdal (1998), Falkner et al. (2005), Hartlapp (2007), Linos (2007), Mastenbroek (2007, Perkins and Neumayer (2007), Toshkov (2008), Joerges and Zürn (2009), Panke (2010b), Zürn and Joerges (2005), Cremona (2012).

  5. And at the 0.1% level in the time lagged models (Table 4).

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  1. Department of Political Science, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Belfortstr. 20, 79085, Freiburg, Germany

    Diana Panke

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Table 5 Full model regressions with 2-year time lags
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Panke, D. The European Court of Human Rights under scrutiny: explaining variation in non-compliance judgments. Comp Eur Polit 18, 151–170 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-019-00157-6

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