The category of legal obligation in the judicial practice of the ECtHR

Abstract

It is indicated that the category of duty, as opposed to the rights and freedoms of a person and citizen in the context of studying the content of the Convention and its interpretation in the practice of the ECtHR, has not yet become the subject of a comprehensive study. That is why we believe that the study of the understanding of the obligation in the content of the Convention and the corresponding practice of the ECtHR will be of urgent importance for legal science. The activity of the European Court of Human Rights on the application and interpretation of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is increasingly gaining importance, particularly in the aspect of interpreting certain legal phenomena. The reason for this trend is the fact that the norms of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms are formulated extremely comprehensively from a content point of view, so their meaning in all the variety of content manifestations is revealed precisely in the practice of the European Court of Human Rights. The interpretative activity of the ECtHR is also of great importance for ensuring the principle of legal certainty. It is the interpretation of legal norms that allows the subject of law to understand their essence, purpose and purpose, as well as to correctly use such norms in certain legal situations. In addition, the interpretative activity of the Strasbourg Court is a tool for increasing the effectiveness of the implementation of convention norms and the level of protection of the legal rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen. And although the practice of the ECtHR does not provide us with definitions of legal obligation, it almost does not indicate its signs, however, responding to the dynamic development of social life, the ECtHR comes to more and more relevant interpretations of the studied concept. A clear example of this is the ECtHR’s chosen approach to the interpretation of the state’s obligations in the field of human rights, which provides for ever wider variations, without singling out exclusively negative or positive obligations. In addition, from the content of the Convention, we identified the concept of «ordinary civic duties» and gave them a description based on the judgments of the ECtHR. Finally, we emphasized the use in the practice of the ECtHR of the concept of «obligation of due diligence», which has not yet been properly developed in domestic science, but plays an important role in the doctrine of obligations.