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This article investigates the reliability of the peer review of human rights judgments by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. It argues that, even if composed of politically motivated actors, the Committee is not to be dismissed too cursorily as a deficient and unreliable system of compliance monitoring. Evidence shows that formal and informal institutional constraints, in particular the presence of a strong Secretariat, constrain the propensity to bargain amongst Council of Europe diplomats acting as peers when monitoring the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Our finding runs contrary to the proposition that Europe constitutes a special case of cultural convergence around respect for international human rights law. The article further argues that hybrid models of compliance monitoring which combine political as well as judicial and technocratic elements may be more effective in facilitating human rights compliance than direct international court orders or expert recommendations.
In recent years, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have been in-creasingly willing to ratify United Nations human rights instruments. This article examines the underlying rationales for these ratifications and the limited range and drivers of subsequent domestic reforms post ratification. Drawing on both a quantitative analysis of engagement with the UN treaty bodies and Charter-based mechanisms in over 120 UN reports and qualitative interviews with over sixty-five government officials, members of civil society, National Human Rights Institutions, lawyers, and judges from all six states, this article argues that in the GCC states, UN human rights treaty ratification results from a desire to increase standing in the international community. Treaty ratification has limited effects driven by international socialization and cautious leadership preferences.
The expanding number of UN treaty bodies with competence to rule on individual complaints as well as the increasing amount of complaints lodged before these bodies trigger the question whether they are capable of acting as a unified institution when dealing with individual complaints or whether they remain as a fragmented institutional site. In this article, we comparatively analyse the case law of all treaty bodies between 2013 and 2016 with the aim of assessing whether UN treaty bodies are moving towards a common institutional trajectory. We find that despite textual differences, the treaty bodies’ case law displays both early signs of a common institutional trajectory and risks of institutional fragmentation. The most significant common institutional trends are access friendliness; self-referential citations, a preference for implicit harmonisation; and case by case activism with respect to individual remedies. Yet, we also identify lack of systematic and explicit cross treaty-fertilization and diverging approaches to specifying general remedies as risks that may undermine the formation of a common institutional trajectory. We argue that the early signs of informal collective institutionalisation may be capable of fostering a common institutional identity in the years to come, if risks of fragmentation are acknowledge and mitigated.
This article traces the evolution of judicial self-government practices (JSG) in Turkey and argues that the frequent changes in JSG are part of a broader trajectory of experimental constitutional politics. The Council for Judges and Prosecutors has experienced sharp turns since its establishment in 1961, respectively in 1971, 1982, 2010, 2014 and 2017.During this period, Turkey experienced different forms of judicial councils ranging from co-option, hierarchical and executive controlled judicial council models to a more pluralistic model. The Justice Academy of Turkey has also not been immune from this experimentalism. The article discusses the endogenous relationship between these often short-lived experiments of JSG and their impacts on the independence, accountability, and legitimacy of the judiciary and public confidence in the judiciary. The article then turns to the repercussions of JSG on separation of powers and democratic principle. It focuses on the implications of the ambiguous position of the Council in the state structure for the separation of powers, and the revived debate on democratic legitimacy of JSG after the 2017 constitutional amendments.
This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘The Responses of the Council of Europe to the Decay of the Rule of Law and Human Rights Protections’. The Council of Europe (CoE), a unique international organisation with its commitment to protect and promote human rights, the rule of law, and democracy, has been severely tested by the spread and consolidation of trends posing systemic threats to its foundational goals. The authors of this Special Issue assess how the European Court of Human Rights, the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly, the Committee of Ministers, and the office of the Secretary General have addressed systemic threats to the foundational principles of the organisation in the last decade. The Special Issue finds that the respective legal-institutional features and capacities of the CoE organs as well as the constraining influence of the broader political context in Europe on them vary significantly, hampering the CoE’s ability to produce timely, consistent, and co-ordinated responses against systemic threats.