Procedure matters: legislative process in the Procrustean bed of the European Court of Human Rights’ case-law

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Recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights shows that the Court has not kept apart from the worldwide trend of the “proceduralization of human rights protection”. The Court has clearly shifted its focus to the quality of the decision-making processes of national authorities. Most striking is the Court’s assessment of the legislative processes of member States of the Council of Europe as manifestations of a new democracy-enhancing approach. If the court reaches a positive conclusion on the basis of such an assessment in a particular case, it becomes an indication of the proper exercise by that national parliament of its responsibility to ensure the Convention’s rights and freedoms and may constitute grounds for granting that State a wide-ranging margin of state discretion (margin of appreciation). This raises the question of whether the European Court of Human Rights, in frequently avoiding giving its own evaluation of legislative limits on rights, continues to properly fulfil its basic role of protecting the Convention’s rights and freedoms. Moreover, such practice is of normative importance – the Court in fact sets European standards for the legislative process thereby jeopardizing its own legitimacy. Despite the serious challenges being faced by the ECtHR, its attention to the legislative process has not diminished. However, we are still not very familiar with the Court’s approach, largely because of the inconsistency and opacity of its case law. In order to broaden the understanding of the Court’s approach to the evaluation of the legislative process and its criteria, the author uses an automated content analysis of the Court’s rulings. This method has allowed analysis of the large mass of cases in order to identify ECtHR rulings in which the international court has resorted to procedural arguments in assessing the conformity with the Convention of a general measure introduced by the legislature. A qualitative study of this qualitative analysis has made it possible to provide a truer measure of broad patterns in the Court’s case law dealing with assessments of national legislative processes and to examine deviations in the relevant practice of the Court.

About the author: Anna Shvets – Postgraduate Student of the Faculty of Law, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Shvets A. (2021) Protsedura imeet znachenie: zakonodatel’nyy protsess v prokrustovom lozhe pretse­dentnogo prava Evropeyskogo Suda po pravam cheloveka [Procedure matters: legislative process in the Procrustean bed of the European Court of Human Rights’ case-law]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 132–153. (In Russian).

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