The democratic legitimacy of international Human Rights conventions : political constitutionalism and the European Convention on Human Rights

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dc.contributor.authorBELLAMY, Richard (Richard Paul)
dc.date.accessioned2015-01-22T09:40:09Z
dc.date.available2015-01-22T09:40:09Z
dc.date.issued2014
dc.description.abstractInternational Human Rights Courts (IHRCts), such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), have come under increasing criticism as being incompatible with domestic judicial and legislative mechanisms for upholding rights. These domestic instruments are said to possess greater democratic legitimacy than international instruments do or could do. Within the UK this critique has led some prominent judges and politicians to propose withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Legal cosmopolitans respond by denying the validity of this democratic critique. By contrast this article argues that such criticisms are defensible from a political constitutionalist perspective but that International Human Rights Conventions (IHRCs) can nevertheless be understood in ways that meet them. To do so, IHRC must be conceived as legislated for and controlled by an international association of democratic states, which authorizes IHRCts and holds them accountable, limiting them to ‘weak review’. The resulting model of IHRC is that of a ‘two level’ political constitution. The ECHR is shown to largely accord with this model, which is argued to be both more plausible and desirable than a legal cosmopolitan model that sidelines democracy and advocates ‘strong’ review.en
dc.identifier.citationEuropean journal of international law, 2014, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 1019-1042en
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/ejil/chu069
dc.identifier.endpage1042en
dc.identifier.issn1464-3596
dc.identifier.issn0938-5428
dc.identifier.issue4en
dc.identifier.startpage1019en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/34297
dc.identifier.volume25en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.relation.ispartofEuropean Journal of International Lawen
dc.titleThe democratic legitimacy of international Human Rights conventions : political constitutionalism and the European Convention on Human Rightsen
dc.typeArticleen
dspace.entity.typePublication
eui.subscribe.skiptrue
person.identifier.orcid0000-0002-9823-0626
person.identifier.other27604
relation.isAuthorOfPublication58c88824-ee3e-4a35-acfc-957fd62e3870
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery58c88824-ee3e-4a35-acfc-957fd62e3870
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