By Janneke Gerards (professor of fundamental rights law, Utrecht University) and Sarah Lambrecht (researcher, Research Group Government and Law, UAntwerp and law clerk at the Belgian Constitutional Court[1])
At the High Level Conference meeting in Copenhagen on 12 and 13 April 2018 under the Danish Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the Copenhagen Declaration was adopted. This Declaration was much anticipated, as the draft version issued on 5 February 2018 by the Danish Government was heavily criticised. Academics (on EJIL:Talk!, Strasbourg Observers and ECHR Blog, UK Strasbourg Spotlight and Verfassungsblog), NGOs (see also the Director of ICJ, the Executive Director of Open Society Justice Initiative and the Danish Helsinki-Committee of Human Rights), national human rights institutions, members of national parliaments in PACE and civil servants expressed grave concern about the harm the draft Copenhagen Declaration could do to the Court’s independence and authority, about its misconstruction of the Court’s jurisdiction and role (especially when defining the Convention system’s subsidiary nature), its potential to undermine the universality of human rights, and its objective of installing new channels of ‘dialogue’, which could have the effect of exposing the Court to undue political pressure by national governments. Overall, most commentators agreed that the initial draft, if adopted as such, would damage the Convention’s system of protection of human rights in Europe as a whole. Continue reading