Strategies of compliance with the European Court of Human Rights : rational choice within normative constraints / Andreas von Staden.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Von Staden, Andreas, 1970- author.

Series:

Pennsylvania studies in human rights

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European Court of Human Rights.

Compliance.

Human rights--Government policy--Germany.

Human rights.

Human rights--Government policy--Great Britain.

Effectiveness and validity of law--European Union countries.

Effectiveness and validity of law.

International law and human rights--European Union countries.

International law and human rights.

Human rights--Government policy.

European Union countries.

Germany.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

vi, 342 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018]

Summary:

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, the author 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, the author details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges respond 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, the author argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separated from the question of how to comply. According to the author, 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.

Contents:

Introduction: the convention, the court, and second-order compliance

Compliance theory: rational choice within normative constraints. Part 1 The United Kingdom : The uneasy peace of the ECHR and ECtHR in UK law and politics

Compliance with just satisfaction awards and individual measures

Compliance with general measures I: sociopolitical issues

Compliance with general measures II: security, crime, and justice

Judgments pending before the Committee of Ministers

Minimalism as the strategy of choice for the reluctant complier. Part 2 Germany : The convention and court within constitutionalize rights protection

Compliance with general measures

exploiting choice within a domestic human rights culture

Human rights compliance as normatively constrained rational choice. Appendix: further judgments against the United Kingdom. Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812250282

0812250281

OCLC:

1006800340