The social legitimacy of Human Rights Courts: a grounded interpretivist analysis of the European Court of Human Rights

  • This article offers an empirically grounded interpretivist theory of the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights based on domestic judicial and political elite accounts of the legitimacy of the Court in Turkey, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The central argument of the article is that the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is based on a constant comparison between the values and goals of domestic institutions and the values and goals of the European Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is grounded in the logic of a fair compromise: What actors think they lose by according legitimacy to the European Court of Human Rights must be balanced by what they perceive to gain in return. Three factors organise how actors in different domestic settings struck a fair compromise in their domestic contexts: a) perception of domestic human rights conditions, b) commitment to cosmopolitan ideals of human rights and international law and c) commitment to domestic institutions.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Başak Çalı, Anne Koch, Nicola Bruch
Parent Title (English):Human Rights Quarterly
ISSN:1085-794X
Publisher:The Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication year:2013
First Page:955
Last Page:984
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2013.0057
Release Date:2017/08/03
Tag:European Court of Human Rights; elite opinion; interpretivism; legitimacy
Volume:35
Issue:3
Hertie School Research:Centre for Fundamental Rights
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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