Disrupting Strasbourg: Conservative Christian challengers versus liberal incumbents

From 2020 to 2024, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), a conservative NGO backed by US evangelical Christians, secured certain procedural reforms to the practices of the European Court of Human Rights. The rules and guidance governing the recusal of judges were elaborated, and third-party intervention was made more transparent. These reforms were intended to constrain judicial discretion and possibly limit the liberal human rights community’s influence over the Court’s substantive jurisprudence and the Council of Europe’s (CoE) policies toward its member states and the public at large. Given the liberals’ predominance in strategic supranational litigation and their institutional incumbency, this is a puzzling outcome. The challenge to Strasbourg’s democratic legitimacy took place in the teeth of a tightly closed political opportunity structure for conservative Christians. Relying on process tracing and abductive inference to the best explanation known, within an actor-centered institutionalist framework, we show how the ECLJ, acting as a norm entrepreneur, controverted certain possible conflicts of interest involving named judges and prominent liberal NGOs and their private donors. In the process, it mobilized conservative member state governments and delegates to national and supranational parliaments to prevail on the CoE committee system (comitology) and the Court to undertake limited reforms. These concessions demonstrate the potential of a new elite transnational network of ­conservative Christians to challenge Strasbourg’s incumbents against a political background of rising populism.