Universality or Diversity of Human Rights?: Strasbourg in the Age of Subsidiarity

Over the past few years, the European Court of Human Rights has been criticised in several extrajudicial speeches in the United Kingdom. In this article the author, a judge of the Strasbourg Court, analyses some of this criticism, focussing especially on Lord Hoffmann’s views in his 2009 farewell lecture, The Universality of Human Rights, as well as discussing some more recent speeches by senior British judges. The author argues that, contrary to some of this criticism, the Strasbourg Court has gradually developed its approach in relation to the principle of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation by adopting a qualitative, democracy-enhancing approach in the assessment of domestic decision-making in the field of human rights. In this way, the Court has demonstrated its willingness to defer to the reasoned and thoughtful assessment by national authorities of their Convention obligations. In this connection, the article then discusses briefly the case law of the Strasbourg Court on the exhaustion of domestic remedies in relation to declarations of incompatibility under the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK).