Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention by Marie‐Bénédicte Dembour
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00659_2.x |
| Author | Stephen Humphreys |
| Published date | 01 July 2007 |
| Date | 01 July 2007 |
this book take the opportunity to explore them in an engaging and thought-
provoking manner.When I ¢rst picked it up, the far-£ung unfamiliarity nearly
made me put it straight back down; it would be a shame if many other readers
succumbed to that same temptation.
AdamTucker
n
Marie-BeŁne
Łdicte Dembour,Who Believes in Human Rights? Re£ections on the
European Convention,310pp,d29.99, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006
Rulings of the European Court of Human Rights have generated much praise
over the years, but they have also been a cause of considerable dissatisfaction.
There are a number of reasons for this. Sometimes an outcome seems manifestly
unjust ^ think, for example, of Buckley vUnited Kingdom, where the removal by
the public authorities of a single mother and her children from her own property
near their school to an unsanitary ‘halting site’ much further away was deemed
not to violate her right to ‘family life’. Sometimes the court’s reasoni ng appears
to descend into opacity right at the most important moment ^ such as in the
manycases where, having expressed sympathy with an applicant’s cause, the court
nevertheless determines that a state’s actions were ‘not disproportionate’ or fell
within the state’s‘margin of appreciation’ without reallyexplaining how this con-
clusionwas reached. Sometimes the courtseems unreasonably stubborn ^ as in its
refusal until very recently to contemplate seriously claims of racial discrimination
under Article 14;when it ¢nally did so, inthe case of Na chova v. Bulgaria, the court
still rejectedthe need to reverse the burdenof proof in such cases. Andsometimes,
the verynarrow remitof the court itself is reasonfor dissatisfaction: therehas been
no real expansion of the original list of rights laid out ¢fty years ago in the Eur-
opean Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms ^ into, for
example, the areas of social and economic rights ^ and there has been a conscious
avoidance of overlap with the jurisdiction of the EuropeanUnion’s institutions.
Marie-Be
Łne
Łdicte Dembour confronts just these sorts of questions in her
nuancedyet admirably perspicacious investigation into the Strasbourgcourt’s case
law. Her study reaches well beyond standard case analysis, in an attempt to ¢gure
out whatexactly the great promise of humanrights amounts toi npractice.This is
an excellentbook, but it is also somewhat frustrating.It is excellent because ofthe
exemplary clarity of thought and exposition throughout, the range of case law
examined and the broad interpretative perspective brought to bear without
retreating into dogma. It is frustrating because despite these signi¢cant qualities,
it is very di⁄cult to know what it is, in the end, Dembour wishes to say. Indeed,
this latest addition to Cambridge University Press’s ¢ne Law in Context series
often reads like two warring books.The ¢rst, comprising the introduction and
¢nal chapter, is a short tight thesis identifying four ‘schools’ (she uses the term
with reservation) of human rights thought. The second ^ the six chapters at the
n
School of Law,University of Manchester.
Reviews
709
r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2007) 70(4) M LR 701^712
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