The Real Politics of The European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

Fundamental rights protection in the European space rests on the sharing of Powers between the level of state sovereignty and the supranational level of sovereignty established by the European Convention on Human Rights. These two levels of sovereignty are not separated from each other by watertight partitions. On the contrary, there is a complementary relationship between the two levels. The governing thing in this relation is subsidiarity as a jurisprudential principle produced by the European Court of Human Rights. The principle of subsidiarity means that the protection of fundamental rights falls “primarily” to the state parties, while the Court has a “regulatory” judicial function. However, with Protocol No. 15, entered into force on 1 August 2021, the principle has been added to the text of the Convention by the states parties, and these same states have sought to preserve their sovereignty and the original characteristics of their domestic law. At this point, the essential concern of the study is to put the meaning of Protocol No. 15 on the idea of unity in the European space and the mutual development line of the Convention law and to ask several questions for the future.