INTRODUCTION

The European Convention on Human Rights is an international treaty for the protection of fundamental (mostly) civil and political liberties in European democracies committed to the rule of law. It was created in 1950 by the ten Council of Europe states – an organization founded the previous year – as part of the process of reconstructing western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like the Council of Europe itself, it has since grown to embrace every state in Europe except Belarus, forty-six in total, with a land mass stretching from Iceland to Vladivostok and a combined population of nearly 800 million.

It is not, of course, the only international human rights treaty in the contemporary world. Several others are global in scope and there are also regional regimes in the Americas, Africa, in the Arab world, and between the former Soviet republics. But it is unique in providing, what is widely regarded as the most effective trans-national judicial process for complaints brought by individuals and organizations against their own governments, and, much less frequently, accusations of violation made by member states against each other. Nor is the Convention the only site for the institutionalization of the human rights ideal in post-war Europe. The profile of human rights has grown in other transnational European organizations, particularly and increasingly, the European Union, while national constitutional and legal processes have also converged around a single model characterized by the Convention ideals of constitutional democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.