Stampede for Justice? Legal Mobilization before the European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the most active international court in the world. After decades in which few allegations of human rights abuses reached the Court, the docket expanded dramatically in the 1990s and exploded after 2000. Meanwhile, just four states account for nearly half of all ECHR judgments. Yet it is implausible that the rate of human rights abuses across Europe increased dramatically since the 1990s or that just four states account for the majority of violations. Instead, variations in legal mobilization over time and across states generate this surge and concentration of ECHR judgments. In this article, I explore the frequent mismatch between the potential “demand” for European redress that derives from the experience of abuse and the “supply” of this redress in the form of ECHR judgments. More specifically, I examine the relationship cross-nationally between the incidence of torture and the rate of declared violations of Article 3 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the Convention), which prohibits torture. No simple linear relationship between these two factors exists, as it would if all victims of torture successfully filed applications at the ECHR. I argue that mismatches between the incidence of torture and ECHR denunciations of it reflect variations in legal mobilization and access, where the rate of declared violations can reflect the ease of access individuals have in pursuing claims rather than the actual incidence of torture in a state.