Authoritarian Resistance and Judicial Complicity: Turkey and the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract International courts face growing contestations to their authority. Scholars have conceptualized the forms and grounds of such resistance as well as the response of international courts. Much empirical research has focused on regional courts with human rights mandates. Yet, in focusing on overt resistance, not differentiating between authoritarian and democratic regimes, and depicting courts at the receiving end of resistance, scholarship does not account for discrete forms of resistance tolerated and enabled by courts. In addition, studies on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) base their analyses exclusively on judgments, which constitute a mere 9 per cent of this Court’s jurisprudence. This methodological bias, combined with a time frame limited to the post-2010s when the ECtHR has faced public contestations to its authority, have led to inaccurate and incomplete conclusions regarding the Strasbourg Court’s response to backlash and illiberalism. This article calls for a goal-orientated conceptualization of resistance and a methodology that analyses the ECtHR’s non-judgment jurisprudence in its entirety to reach accurate conclusions on its response to authoritarianism. Based on an in-depth and contextual analysis of the ECtHR-Turkey case, the article puts forth empirically grounded insights on authoritarian resistance and judicial complicity. It argues that authoritarian regimes seek to lessen international courts’ oversight of their policies, not to undermine the authority of these courts as such, and that international courts are not always resilient vis-à-vis authoritarian resistance but can also be complicit with it. The forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depend on the institutional set-up of the human rights regime in question as well as the ways in which international courts exercise their review powers. The two phenomena influence and reinforce each other, resulting in the simultaneous or consecutive occurrence of various forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depending on the particular political context in which they interact.