The Advent and Fall of Trust as a Cornerstone of Judicial Cooperation in Multilateral Regimes in Europe. A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

The complex network of trust-based and trust-enhancing mechanisms is nowadays confronted with the advent of illiberal democracies in Europe resulting in the regression of democratic guarantees in the form of human rights and/or rule of law backsliding. In this chapter, we will first flesh out the notion of trust in order to better comprehend its multifaceted nature (II) and then, after analyzing the notion of human rights/rule of law backsliding, we will present the way multilateral judicial cooperation networks in Europe attempt to adjust to the above phenomenon turning firstly to the ECtHR (III.A) and secondly to the EU’s judicial system (III.B), before offering some tentative conclusions (IV).