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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.
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.
Questions of migration control have long been of central concern to wealthy Western states that attract large numbers of new immigrants. While border control measures aimed at deciding who is allowed to enter state territory and who is prevented from doing so are generally accepted as a legitimate sovereign prerogative, the removal of resident non-citizens tends to be far more controversial. Deportation, i.e., the enforcement of legal obligations to leave the country, is often considered a “cruel power” (Gibney 2008: 147) on the part of the state because it bears the potential of tearing vulnerable individuals from their families and breaking other social ties. In liberal democracies, return enforcement has therefore traditionally been considered a measure of last resort, rather than a normal policy option. This normative assessment is closely interlinked with liberal-democratic states’ emphasis on individual rights (Hampshire 2013: 44-47). This rights-based identity leads to instances in which not only non-citizens’ right to physical integrity, but also their right to family life and their claims to social belonging in their country of residence may trump the state’s prerogative to control access to its territory, and delegitimize forced return. In line with these considerations, the enforcement of former colonial citizens’ legal obligation to leave the United Kingdom (UK) was denounced as “un-British” during the late 1970s.2 In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, so-called guest worker programmes became discredited as domestic authorities proved unwilling or unable to enforce the idea of strictly temporary stay (Pagenstecher 1995). In addition, both the UK and Germany have over the course of the past four decades enacted a number of one-off regularizations of asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected, but who were granted legal residence on the basis of their extended stay in the respective country (cf. Baldwin-Edwards/Kraler 2009).
Steuern und Abgaben auf Produkte oder Verbrauch mit gesellschaftlichen Folgekosten (externe Kosten) – sogenannte Pigou- oder Lenkungssteuern – sind ein gesellschaftliches „Win-Win-Instrument“. Sie verbessern die Wohlfahrt und schützen gleichzeitig die Umwelt und das Klima. Dies wird erreicht, indem umweltschädigende Aktivitäten einen Preis bekommen, der möglichst exakt der Höhe des Schadens entspricht. Eine konsequente Bepreisung der externen Kosten nach diesem Prinzip könnte in Deutschland erhebliche zusätzliche Einnahmen erbringen: Basierend auf bisherigen Studien zu externen Kosten wären zusätzliche Einnahmen in der Größenordnung von 348 bis 564 Milliarden Euro pro Jahr (44 bis 71 Prozent der gesamten Steuereinnahmen) möglich. Die Autoren warnen allerdings, dass die Bezifferung der externen Kosten mit erheblichen Unsicherheiten verbunden ist. Damit Lenkungssteuern und -abgaben ihre positiven Lenkungs- und Wohlstandseffekte voll entfalten können, seien zudem institutionelle Reformen notwendig.