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 by the 1990s and exploded after 2000. Widespread delays in the execution of ECHR judgments then first emerged in the Council of Europe’s (CE) renowned human rights regime by 2004. Yet it is implausible that the rate of human rights abuses increased dramatically during these periods. What explains the stampede to the ECHR, and what implications does this legal mobilization have for Europe? Official accounts of institutional overload and rising noncompliance highlight the interaction of reforms expanding direct individual access in 1998 and the doubling of CE membership that followed the end of the Cold War. Yet dramatic increases in applications preceded both the reforms and the enlargement of membership. In this paper I argue that the stampede for justice exposes the extent to which compliance with ECHR judgments has historically been limited by deficiencies in the rule of law in many European democracies. Legal mobilization challenging this “contained compliance” inspired the ECHR to a shift from a system of individual dispute resolution toward a system of transnational “public law litigation” that imposes a much more demanding compliance burden on member states. I demonstrate that the stampede for justice afflicts both established and transitional democracies and is most severe in states with the least effective rule of law.