6 - Views of the ECtHR Judges on Their Role in Shaping European Public Order

Summary

The views of the ECtHR judges influence the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and are also crucial for resolving the existential questions of the Court’s functionality and development. The practice of the ECtHR is such that the individual views of the judges are rarely explicitly expressed in the judgments. The voices of individual judges can be identified from their dissenting and concurring opinions but, even then, their views are often expressed in relation to particular cases and rarely cover broad theoretical questions. This chapter predominantly listens to the voices of the ECtHR judges; it is based on a set of interviews with the sitting judges. The preliminary observation is that these voices are not singing in ‘unison’; they are quite ‘polyphonic’, competing with and contradicting each other. However, this is not surprising and does not make discovering and analysing the views from the bench any less interesting or useful.