The impact of the universal standard of human rights protection on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. A critical analysis

Project funded by NCN, carried out from 1 March 2017 to 28 February 2022.

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General Information

International human rights law has become part of the law system of all democratic states. Poland is a party to treaties that belong to both the universal (UN) and the Council of Europe system of human rights protection. Both these systems function independently of each other, but their mutual influence is growing.

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Project objectives

The research project will reconstruct the relevant standards: the treaty norms and their interpretation by the Council of Europe and the UN. This will apply only to those provisions that refer to the rights and freedoms governed by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The next key phase of the study will be to ascertain whether these standards of the UN treaty system influence the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. The UN system consists of nine conventions regulating various aspects of human rights. In the process of interpreting these treaties, the supervisory bodies that they established, the so-called UN treaty bodies, play a major role. Gauging the scope and significance of this influence will require a detailed analysis of the Court’s case law. The research will help to show the potential that the UN standard can bring to the European system and to indicate examples of areas where it could be used more extensively. The findings will provide answers to questions such as: how significant is the impact of the UN system on the Council of Europe system in the area under study; does this impact modify the way the ECtHR interprets the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights; and is it possible and desirable from the point of view of human rights protection guaranteed by the ECHR to work towards increasing this impact?

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Head Prof. Roman Wieruszewski