October 14, 2024
Founded in April 2010, the Strasbourg Observers Blog is soon celebrating its 15th Anniversary. At this occasion, we are organizing a symposium in Ghent, Belgium.
This symposium will be an occasion for real-life exchange between the blog’s readers, contributors and the current and former members of its editorial team. At the symposium, researchers whose papers are selected for inclusion will receive feedback on their work from current and former ECtHR Judges.
With almost 5000 subscribers and over 1000 published blogposts, Strasbourg Observers has become a household name among scholars, students and practitioners working on/with/at the European Court of Human Rights.
When it launched in 2010, the blog had the intention to study the European Court of Human Rights’ case law with the aim of proposing innovative solutions to strengthen the consistency and persuasiveness of the Court’s legal reasoning so as to improve its accountability and transparency. The symposium is situated in the same tradition.
We welcome abstracts (and panels proposals) that analyse and reflect on important developments in the ECtHR case law and/or scholarship over these past 15 years. When we take a few steps back, and look at this decade-and-a-half, what patterns do we see, and what novelties? What are promising developments, and what are rather discouraging?
We are particularly interested in abstracts that focus on the Court’s ways of reasoning across various thematic areas as well as in abstracts that take a step outside of the Court’s case law and delve into questions about how it operates as an institution. We also welcome abstracts discussing novel approaches and methods (both quantitative and qualitative) in ECtHR scholarship.
We do not encourage abstracts that merely describe the evolution of a particular line of case law.
Please send your abstract of around 300 words to strasbourgobservers@gmail.com by December 2, 2024 and include your name, affiliation and a short bio. If you wish to submit a collection of abstracts as a complete panel proposal, please indicate the panel convenor and panel title on top of the information requested for individual abstract submission.
We aim to send out the results of the selection process before the end of the year. Paper presenters will be requested to send in a position paper of 1,500 to 2,500 words by the 1st of May 2025. Selected position papers will be published as a collection on the Strasbourg Observers blog in the weeks following the Anniversary Symposium.
The Anniversary Symposium will take place in Ghent, Belgium on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 May, 2025.
We regret that we are not able to provide accommodation or refund the travel costs of the attendees. The registration fee for attendees will be 100 euro.
Strasbourg Observers is an academic blog that discusses recent developments at the European Court of Human Rights. The editorial team of Strasbourg Observers is based at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University and the Centre for Government and Law of Hasselt University.
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