Paper Titles & Abstracts

The European consensus argument has been deployed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in its reasoning in a large number of cases. There is European consensus if a significant number of the Contracting Parties to the Convention adopts certain legislation or follows similar legal practice. In such cases it is highly likely that the ECtHR will hold that the law which differs from European consensus (ECHR) violates the European Convention. In order to establish the European consensus, the ECtHR compares laws and practices of the Contracting Parties, including their obligations under international treaties. This paper seeks to answer the question of how the forthcoming EU accession to the ECtHR may impact on identification of the European consensus.To answer this question, the paper first explores the legal changes that the EU accession will bring about, arguing that the EU accession to the ECHR is a significant legal and political development in the evolution of the EU and that the ECtHR will establish more formal rules of interaction between the two systems. The paper further explains how the ECtHR is engaged in dialogue with the Contracting Parties through deployment of European consensus, arguing that once the EU becomes the Contracting Party to the ECHR, the European consensus will also be used as a means of a dialogue between the ECtHR and the EU. Finally, the paper concludes by analyzing the possible impact of EU Law on establishing the European consensus and consider emerging trends in cooperation between the two courts.