Law, politics, and efficacy at the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

Why do people experience legal institutions as effective sites for political and social transformation? How do people translate political and ethical goals into modalities of law? In Europe many have responded to a widespread sense of political crisis by turning to legal remedies and judicial institutions. One of these institutions, the European Court of Human Rights, provides shared frameworks for combating people's sense of impasse or decline. People experience the Court as a successful rights institution because it shapes and generates shared semiotic forms and repertoires. Through these, lawyers, judges, and rights advocates construct and recognize their actions as efficacious. Yet the experience of efficacy is an unequally shared resource. For some, legal frameworks are the condition of possibility for ethical and professional engagement. But for others, engaging with the law produces frustration and exclusion. Moreover, engaging in judicialized politics shapes some harms as legally legible and actionable, while it shapes others as tragedies beyond reach. [law, politics, liberalism, judicialization of politics, justice, human rights, efficacy, metapragmatics, Europe]

Justice suspended: Rethinking institutions, regimentation, and channels from a human rights law perspective

“…Second, the ECHR system is exemplary of how people experience textually mediated social interaction through the repetition of discursive forms, and inconsistency of the institutional project writ large. Many who engage the system experience it as both enduring and fraught with irreconcilable contradictions that reveal its fragility (Dembour, 2010; Greenberg, 2020). The Convention institutions bring together multiple actors with vastly different interests and needs.…”

Disappointment

“…Yet slogging through can sometimes also turn failure into a political resource to mobilize collective action (Musallam 2019). Disappointment and exhaustion can even be a language through which people collectively name and identify the small and imperfect actions that keep politics in motion (Greenberg 2020).…”

Planned Misery of the Children in Al-Hol: Distancing as Bar to Rights and Consular Protection

“…One way to answer this question is to reflect upon it in terms of agency, more specifically, its lack among Al-Hol prisoners. In her ethnography of the European Court of Human Rights, Jessica Greenberg discusses the motivations that the tens of thousands of annual petitioners have for bringing their cases before the court (Greenberg, 2020).…”