Professor Marten Breuer of the Law School of the University of Konstanz in Southern Germany is organising a conference entitled “Principled Resistance against ECtHR Judgments – a New Paradigm?”. It will take place in the town hall of Konstanz on 1 and 2 June and will feature both country-specific (Russia, UK, Italy, Switzerland and Germany) and general contributions as well as a final roundtable in which I will also participate. The full programme can be found here. This is the organisers’ abstract about the conference:
‘In recent years, there have been more and more instances where national courts, in a principled manner, declared their unwillingness or inability to give suit to an ECtHR judgment. So far, those cases have initiated discussions about the Court’s ‘legitimacy’ and about the necessity of having a ‘dialogue between judges’. The conference takes a different approach, labelling such cases examples of ‘principled resistance’. The research question is whether those cases reveal a general pattern: Has the Court overstretched its competence by its evolutive interpretation so that cases of ‘principled resistance’ may be explained as reactions necessary to preserve national identity? Or is the current accumulation of such cases just a coincidence and are the underlying rationales too divergent to reveal a general pattern? The conference aims to give a dogmatic answer to those questions and thereby to help preserving the long-term functioning of the Convention.’
Registration can be done here.
