On the rule of law and the quality of the law: reflections of the constitutional-turned-international judge
Western legal tradition gave the birth to the concept of the rule of law. Legal theory and constitutional justice significantly contributed to the crystallisation of its standards and to moving into the direction of the common concept of the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights uses this...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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2018
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| Online Access: | https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaiart?codigo=6800418 |
| Source: | Teoría y realidad constitucional, ISSN 1139-5583, Nº 42, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos), pags. 131-159 |
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| Summary: |
Western legal tradition gave the birth to the concept of the rule of law. Legal theory and constitutional justice significantly contributed to the crystallisation of its standards and to moving into the direction of the common concept of the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights uses this concept as an interpretative tool, the extension of which is the quality of the law doctrine, which encompasses concrete requirements for the law under examination in this Court, such as prospectivity of law, its foreseeability, clarity etc. The author of the article, former judge of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court and currently the judge of the European Court of Human Rights, examines how the latter court has gradually intensified (not always consistently) its reliance on the rule of law as a general principle, inherent in all the Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, to the extent that in some of its judgments it concentrates not anymore on the factual situation of an individual applicant, but, first and foremost, on the examination of the quality of the law. The trend is that, having found the quality of the applicable law to be insufficient, the Court considers that the mere existence of contested legislation amounts to an unjustifiable interference into a respective right and finds a violation of respective provisions of the Convention. This is an indication of the Court’s progressing self-approximation to constitutional courts, which are called to exercise abstract norm-control. |
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