The adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights into municipal law : a comparative analysis

Abstract

From the very beginning, the Convention was also conceived as the basic law for the envisaged European union and today, more than forty years after it was adopted, it has been ratified by twenty-four of the twenty-nine Council of Europe member States. The Convention can be described as a means of bringing Europe together as was recently witnessed when the path to Strasbourg was undertaken by States of central and eastern Europe after the fall of the communist regime. In its forty years' existence, the Convention, designed as a framework for the political reconstruction of Europe after the catastrophe of the thirties and forties, has thus developed into a 'European Constitution'. It has been claimed that this success was made possible in view of the fact that the member States of the Council of Europe never left any doubt as to the need to protect fundamental rights at a European level; as well as, because the Strasbourg institutions and their increasingly extensive case-law has had a persuasive effect on the member States and, not least, because the national courts recognised their role and responsibilities in connection with the protection of fundamental rights which the Convention was intended to achieve and increasingly assumed the functions which devolved upon them in this regard. The following study will therefore attempt to prove the manner in which this success was achieved, mainly through an insight into whether incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into the domestic legal systems of the member States of the Council of Europe is indispensable for an effective system of human right protection.