The Natural 'Home' of Fundamental Rights Adjudication: Constitutional Challenges to the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights (ECHR) has successfully permeated the domestic legal orders of most Council of Europe (hereinafter COE) member States. It has become an essential point of reference for fundamental rights adjudication in the different legal orders of the European legal space. The Convention might well have become ‘a constitutional instrument of European public law’, as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) claimed. 1 The jurisprudence of the ECtHR has gained an equally prominent position in multilevel adjudication of fundamental rights. The Court is accepted as the authoritative interpreter of the Convention and its case-law is considered a guiding source of fundamental rights adjudication. The text of the ECHR considers that only member States who act as defendants in a Strasbourg procedure, are under the obligation to abide by a Strasbourg judgment. 2 Yet, the jurisprudence of the Court has gained, to...