Jonas Christoffersen, director of the Danish Institute of Human Rights, has just published a reworked version of his Ph.D. thesis as a book: Fair Balance: Proportionality, Subsidiarity and Primarity in the European Convention on Human Rights with Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. An important addition to the field of ECHR studies and a very extensive analytical work (670 pages) on a legally complicated principle. This is the abstract:
In one of the most important publications on the European Convention and Court of Human Rights in recent years, a wide range of fundamental practical and theoretical problems of crucial importance are addressed in an original and critical way bringing a fresh, coherent and innovative order into well-known battle zones.
The analysis revolves around the Court’s fair balance-test and comprises in-depth analyses of e.g. methods of interpretation, proportionality, the least onerous means-test, the notion of absolute rights, subsidiarity, formal and substantive principles, evidentiary standards, proceduralisation of substantive rights etc. The author coins the term of “primarity” in order to clarify the obligation of the Contracting Parties to implement the Convention in domestic law.
