Juristras – The Strasbourg Court, Democracy and Human Rights of Individuals and Communities

The Juristras project studies the relationship between courts and politics, especially with regard to judicial review of human rights within the system of the Council of Europe as well as the impact of this review on the legal framework and related policies at the national level. Specifically, it aims at exploring processes of human rights litigation and state implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as well as the effects of the latter in national legislative reform in a number of EU Member States and Associate Candidate States.
The project tries to examine under what conditions Strasbourg Court judgments, that find state authorities to have breached provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), promote broader domestic reforms or policy-changes and expand justice for individuals and communities.
It specifically focuses on the Court’s growing jurisprudence pertaining to the civil rights of individuals and communities and their participation in the public sphere in a democratic setting. Such case law has primarily grown out of specific categories of cases brought to the ECtHR dealing with violations of the right to privacy and family life, religious freedom and conscience, freedom of expression, assembly and association, or discriminatory treatment. In the course of research, best practices concerning the establishment or improvement of national and European mechanisms for addressing human rights claims and resolving disputes between individual rights and state interests will be identified. Finally, policy recommendations concerning the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, the combating of discrimination and the protection of personal privacy will be formulated.