The right to the proper administration of justice according to Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

Though the discussion about human rights had been going on for centuries, the interest of the jurist had never been more than minimal before the twentieth century. The notion of human rights was too much weighed down by political content to be considered as pure law. Even constitutional lawyers has a hard task formulating human rights and had always subordinated them to the powers of the state. As to the judges, these were compliant enough to satisfy every incursion of the state into the indicidual's realm of human rights without a murmur. Only the philosophers of law showed any interest in the problem but they were too isolated to turn the current of inertia. However, the traditional jurist is fast disappearing as an integration of politics and law within the state has asserted itself and the classic training of the jurist has to be discarded. What formarly appeared as a revolutionary statement of human rights is now being turned into positive law. Witness the various constitutions which have declarations of human rights appended to them. There has also been an evolution on an international place though this may have been slower. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights arrived more than a century and a half after the French Revolution while the European Convention on Human Rights signed at Rome on the 4th November 1950 managed to bridge the gap between what the state internally offeres in the way of human rights and protection on an internaltional plane. This was such a great stip forward that one has to see whether the convention belongs to a regional international law or whether it should be considered European Constitutional Law.