Patrick Davies Jones attended Day Two of ‘Guarding Human Rights and the Rule of Law, and Facilitating Constitutional Resilience: The ECHR at 75 and the Venice Commission at 35’ on November 7th at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Bloomsbury, London.

Ms. Viktória Alžbeta Sutórisová began her presentation with a pleasantry. The lawyer and PHD student at Masaryk University in Czechia said something to the effect of ‘It’s a beautiful Autumn day in London’. I looked behind me to the back of the conference room, where the panoramic windows opened out from Charles Clore House, home of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL), onto Russell Square. Ms. Sutórisová’s insights on the development of western-style judicial structures in the former eastern bloc were fascinating, but her analysis of the weather seemed questionable. The day wasn’t all that beautiful. It was grey; the leaves on the pavement were sodden; sky over Senate House looked distinctly bruised.

Maybe it was fitting that a dark cloud should hang over a conference marking the 75^th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, organised by the BIICL alongside the University of Leicester and the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. Though the range of speakers addressed the ECHR from unique and oblique angles, they all seemed to retain an awareness that the treaty, signed in November 1950, was in an embattled position. The second day of the conference (the first being covered in another article) was itself a battle between two attitudes, with its speakers vacillating between either gloominess or optimism as to the state of human rights protection in Europe and beyond.

Readers who follow politics may well be familiar with the situation in the UK. Leaving the ECHR has for some time now been a staple of right-wing anti-immigration politics, based chiefly on the view that leaving the Convention would make it considerably easier to deport illegal immigrants or foreign criminals who might otherwise be protected by Articles 5 or 8. Unelected judges in Strasbourg deciding who can and can’t stay in the country was naturally bound to irritate the Reform party; the significant recent development has been the conversion of the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch to the same way of thinking. The Tories now propose withdrawing from the Council of Europe, a body that was partly the the brain-child of that notorious leftist and enemy of British sovereignty, Sir Winston Churchill.

Dr Kirsty Hughes of Cambridge University delivered a stand-out paper on the degree of misrepresentation present in the British media’s treatment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). She argued compellingly that rather than being too liberal, the Strasbourg court could in fact warrant criticism for placing too heavy an emphasis on state sovereignty in their reasoning at the expense of individual rights. Her presentation also heavily attacked the ostensible foundation of Badenoch’s decision to adopt the policy of leaving the ECHR, the report authored by the Shadow Attorney-General, Lord Wolfson KC. Dr Hughes cast the report as a series of political objectives masquerading as legal principles, a sentiment that was echoed by other panellists.

The disquieting state of rights protection in the UK was the subject of Dr Stuart Wallace’s paper, which, despite its dark subject matter, got the most laughs of any at the conference. The Leeds-based academic’s presentation included zingers such as comparison of the constitutional arrangement of post-Brexit Northern Ireland to Hotel California: ‘you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’. His talk highlighted how drastically the level of rights protection varies between the home nations of the UK, with both Scottish and Welsh devolved governments seeking to incorporate international rights protection treaties into their laws to the chagrin of a far less rights-friendly government in Westminster. On the more optimistic end of the spectrum were the findings of Ms. Naz Yilancioglu of Maastricht university, who found that the media’s representation of the UK’s relationship with the ECtHR elides the fact that the UK has actually been one of the countries most compliant with the Court’s rulings. I found Ms. Yilancioglu’s research surprising and compelling, but I suspect its historical focus might miss the forest for the trees. When it comes to rights protection, it is not the UK’s history that poses most cause for concern, but rather its future. 

These concerns are not limited to Britain. As Dr. Hughes pointed out, the hostility towards the ECHR on the British right is reflective of a general trend in European right-wing politics; she draw specific attention to the controversial ‘Letter of Nine’ promulgated by a group of signatories led by Denmark and Italy, which heavily criticised the ECtHR’s judgments on immigration matters. The whole scope of the conference was fittingly international, in both its subject matter and its speakers. Topics ranged from comparative analyses of the ECHR with its Latin American counterpart, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, to the role of the Venice Commission in the potential future accession of Ukraine to the European Union.

A particularly surprising talk to round out the evening was given by the BIILC’s own Ms. Adaena Sinclair-Blakemore. It focused on the role of Strasbourg jurisprudence in Australia. Despite Australia not being a party to the treaty, and Australian courts having a reputation for hostility towards international law, her research found that the High Court referenced the document extensively and considerably more than various international treaties to which Australia was a party.

There was a particularly satisfying moment when it transpired one of Ms. Sinclair-Blakemore’s fellow panellists, Professor Japser Krommendijk of Radboud University, happened to have conducted a similar study of the Supreme Court of New Zealand, with similar results. The panels furthermore featured some speakers of real legal import from throughout the world, including a judge of the Bucharest Court of Appeal, Dr Dragoș Călin, a substitute member of the Venice Commission, Dr Kushtrim Istrefi, and Dr Mariam Begadze, a Georgian lawyer who helped prosecute her own increasingly illiberal government before the ECtHR. 

The concentration of so many leading experts in a relatively small room, supplied with ever-refilling jugs of coffee and bowls of biscuits provided by the very diligent team, made the conference an energetic experience. Speakers at other panels would ask long and occasionally quite challenging questions, and the overall air was one of good-humoured academic rigour, despite the frequent bleakness of the presentations’ subject matter. At the conference’s end, the organisers and many of the speakers went off to a nearby pub, and I rather regret not joining them.

For its strengths, the conference was limited by its own format. The organisation of the speakers into thematic panels was done in quite a loose manner. The last panel, for example, purported to be a study of the UK’s approach to human rights set against some ‘comparative lenses’; in reality, it consisted of two papers on the UK, one on the Netherlands, and one on Australia. It felt like there should have been more lenses on show in this slot; but thankfully the comparative work being shared was extended by the audience’s contribution. The papers themselves, while uniformly fascinating and well delivered, were prevented from covering issues in any depth; it is difficult to cover a topic in fifteen minutes and not feel that the coverage has been somewhat cursory. However, if my only major criticism of the event was that I was left wanting more, that is not much of a criticism.

Overall, the organisers and participants in the conference should be satisfied that they are doing important and urgent work. I truly hope the optimism that some of them displayed is warranted. These are troubled times for human rights, and what such an event marking the Conference’s 85^th anniversary would look like remains anyone’s guess.

Patrick (who everybody calls Paddy) is an aspiring barrister on the GDL at The City Law School with an interest in public and commercial practice. As an English student by training, he is still keenly interested in literature, film, history and politics. He’s also willing to bet he knows more about dinosaurs than anyone else on the GDL (fighting talk!). Paddy is a member of this year’s Lawbore Journalism Team.