Book Review: L'Harmonisation de la Liberté d'Éxpression en Europe
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X0100800406 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Author | Ian Cram |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Book Reviews
8 MJ 4 (2001) 417
Mario Oetheimer, L’Harmonisation de la Liberté d’Éxpression en
Europe, Editions A Pedone, 2001, xxxxii + 342 pages, paperback, £54.88
The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms is a major instrument in the field of international human rights protection.
The Convention created both the first international human rights complaints procedure
and the first international court to rule on alleged violations of those rights. Developed
under the auspices of the Council of Europe in response to human rights violations
committed during the Second World War, the Convention entered into force in 1953.
Since this time, the European Court on Human Rights together with the Commission
has created a voluminous body of case law on the interpretation of Convention
guarantees currently applicable across 43 Council of Europe member states. According
to Harris, O’Boyle and Warbrick, the Convention has developed into a European Bill of
Rights in which the Court has played a role ‘akin to that of a constitutional court in a
federal legal system’.1 Steiner and Alston for their part note that the Convention has
‘generated a more extensive jurisprudence than any other part of the international
system.’2
Among the guarantees of individual rights laid down in the Convention, the qualified
right to freedom of expression has been referred to as a fundamental right or core
freedom.3 Mario Oetheimer’s central contribution to the debate on Article 10
jurisprudence in L’Harmonisation de la Liberté d’Éxpression en Europe is to explore in
a scholarly and yet highly accessible manner the dynamics of the relationship between
Strasbourg and national legal systems. In particular, he focuses upon the harmonization
of protection for expression interests, isolating and evaluating the respective
contributions made by domestic legal systems and supra-national authorities in
Strasbourg towards convergence. Of course, a major challenge facing the process of
harmonization consists in the diversities encountered in national legal systems. One of
the central arguments advanced by the author throughout the text is that the promotion
of convergence ought not to entail the sweeping away of national diversities when those
diversities are themselves consistent with Strasbourg norms.
The structure of the book is as follows: Chapter One looks at the structure, composition
and voting records of the judges who sit in the European Court of Human Rights. One
issue which is addressed here is the pattern of voting of national judges in cases
involving their national authorities when that judge’s vote has been crucial to the
finding of violation/non-violation. Thus we learn of the independence of Judge Pettiti
(Butterworths, 1995), 2.
2. H.J. Steiner and P. Alston, International Human Rights in Context – Law, Politics, Morals, (Oxford
University Press, 1996), 571.
3. See thus inter alia, Handyside v UK (1979-80) 1 EHRR 737.
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