Jonas Christoffersen and Mikael Rask Madsen (eds), The European Court of Human Rights Between Law and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 256 pp, hb £60.00.
| Author | Başak Çalı |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2012.00932_2.x |
REVIEWS
Jonas Christoffersen and Mikael Rask Madsen (eds),The European Court of Human
Rights Between Law and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 256
pp, hb £60.00.
There are many legal-doctrinal studies of international human rights law. One
cannot say the same about the social scientific analyses of international human
rights law and its institutions, most notably international human rights courts.
As the introductory chapter of The European Court of Human Rights between
Law and Politics indicates, we lack systematic understandings of the trajectory of
human rights courts as a set of institutional practices interacting with domestic
and international socio-political developments (2). In recent years there has
been a change in this regard and the European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) is its focus: a burgeoning literature on social and political analysis
supplementing the legal doctrinal analysis of the European Court of Human
Rights has sprung up. Chirstoffersen and Madsen’s edited collection is a
welcome addition to this newly emerging sub-field of socio-legal and political
analysis of human rights courts. Whilst the specialists of the ECHR will enjoy
the thoughtful and, at times, controversial individual contributions of authors
analysing European human rights law-in-context from different perspectives,
the real contribution of this book lies in providing multi-dimensional and
multi-method analyses of how the European human rights law is embedded
in socio-political and institutional contexts and how we may go about
studying the relationship between law and politics as it has been played out in
the past fifty years of unprecedented practice marked by adoption, crisis and
change.
The introductory chapter by Christoffersen and Madsen does a good job of
setting out what is required to go beyond the legal core of the ECHR. The
individual chapters are clustered around two organising themes. In the first part
of the book, entitled‘Politics and Institutionalisation’, the focus of the chapters is
to uncover the underlying political struggles over the institutionalisation of the
ECHR from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Here, the
first chapter by Ed Bates (Chapter 2) employs a historic method to argue that
even the genesis of the ECHR was built on conflicting political aims.Whilst the
western European states were keen to mark a common European vision of
human rights, there was much disagreement on how this political commitment
interacts with the national sovereignty of states. Chapter 3 by Mikael Madsen
shows how the (then) European Commission on Human Rights and the Court
in 1950s and the 1960s trod carefully around this foundational conflict, but
through the advent of the ‘living instrument doctrine’ in the second half of the
1970s identified itself as a court that was less diplomatic, and more friendly to
individual applicants. In Chapters 4 and 5, Eric Voeten and Rachel Chicowski
turn to the present with a focus on the transformation of the Court after its
enlargement in the 1990s. Through his analysis of the voting patterns of the
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© 2012The Authors.The Modern Law Review © 2012 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2012) 75(6) MLR 1175–1188
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA
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