The ECHR and the Western Balkans: Bringing the Convention Home

Abstract

What does it ultimately take to bring the ECHR home in all Western Balkans States and embed it properly within these domestic legal orders? This is the main query of this PhD thesis. How have the domestic courts and other domestic authorities reacted following violations found at the Strasbourg level in respect of their State? How often do the highest domestic courts in the Western Balkans engage in Convention talk and what is the quality of such judicial dialogue? What are the roles of the ECtHR and of the domestic courts in view of their shared responsibility to secure and ensure effective protection of Convention rights? When can the Strasbourg Court comfortably defer to the ratio decidendi of the domestic courts and other domestic authorities? What has been the impact and effects of the Convention and the ECtHR’s case-law in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia? What are the good and not so good ECHR embeddedness practices that may be noticed across the Western Balkan States and what are the recommendations that this study suggests with a view to achieve better embeddedness/domestication of the ECHR? These are only some of the remaining research questions that are explored in this PhD monograph.