Against settlement before the European Court of Human Rights

Even though they represent almost 50% of all reported cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), settlements of human rights violations escape scholars’ attention. While victims are increasingly expected to resolve their disputes amicably, it is unclear whether applicants will be better off accepting settlement offers rather than proceeding to litigation. The article charts the practice of friendly settlements before the Court from the 1980s to today, mapping a shift in approach from seeking bilateral solutions to the proactive role of the Registry as mediator encouraging states and applicants to settle their cases to relieve the Court of the heavy workload. The study of 10,500 cases reveals how strategies adopted by the Registry—from procedural changes to how and when consent is given to settlement, to the framing of settlement offers, and a close relationship with representatives of the respondent state—have favored the most frequent violators of the European Convention on Human Rights and sidelined the interests of the applicant. The analysis uncovers that the imbalance between parties and lack of enforcement are very much present in the ECtHR settlement system and that the active role of the Registry has reinforced, rather than redressed these concerns. The findings expose the dangers of pursuing en masse settlement in the human rights context and raise concerns about achieving long-term justice for victims of human rights violations through other means than adjudication

Not All Nations at All Times: How States Imitate Each Other Towards Non-Compliance with International Law Norms: an ABM proposal

In international law studies on compliance in general and compliance with court judgments, there is an assumption of states being compliant by default, and compliance being understood in terms of isolated acts of individual states. Empirical research on compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments has questioned the first theoretical assumption, and has produced insights into the compliance dynamics within the Council of Europe. One such insight shows an initial “conditional generosity” of the European Human Rights system towards non-compliers which did not impede (or even facilitated) a gradual development of better compliance rates among the states. However, even empirical research often leaves the second theoretical assumption untouched. In the present contribution, we report on a model of the 47 (now 46) member states of the Council of Europe as a dynamic network of unitary actors and explore with a threshold model how the norm of compliance-with-ECtHR-judgements moves within the network, and how states associate and disassociate from one another in the course of establishing and spreading a norm. With the model, we aim to contribute to the discussion around these theoretical assumptions and empirical findings by showing that (a) rather than strictly favoring compliance under all conditions, the network of states tends towards non-compliance often, (b) the behavior of compliance is not and cannot be seen as a series of isolated actions by individual states, and that (c) compliance rates are locked in relatively quickly and subsequently do not change much over tim

Democracy and Statehood

This Essay addresses the relationship between democracy and statehood. The two concepts have been linked since the 1990s, when new entities claiming statehood were expected to have constituted themselves on a democratic basis and to have put in place democratic government structures to be recognized by the international community. Yet, as Professor Tom Ginsburg’s book Democracies and International Law reveals, the rise of autocracies and a general backlash against democracy in the last three decades have led to changes in countries’ behavior. This Essay argues that today, the requirement of democratic process and institutions for international recognition is less stringent. Even more, it posits that if autocracies team up to recognize other similarly non-democratic entities, democracy might play no role in the formation of new states in the long run. In this regard, Democracies and International Law may signal an end to the 1990s European approach to recognition and be an indication of a new reality in the area of statehood