Dimitry V. Kochenov (CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest), Sarah Ganty (Yale Law School), and Ignatius Yordan Nugraha (Hertie School) have posted Constitutional Identity vs. Human Rights: The ECtHR’s Bizarre Turn in Three Latvian Cases, published in VerfBlog (Dec. 23, 2023), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This brief contribution, which appeared in the Verfassungsblog on 23 December 2023 showcases a recent trend in ECtHR case-law, where the raison d’être of the Convention is given up in favour of rubber-stamping a hateful (mis)formulation of ‘constitutional identity’ of the members of the European human rights protection system. Now the Court explicitly allows framing ‘constitutional identity’ around the destruction of the Convention rights of others, especially minorities, undoing previous case-law and ruining countless lives without, however, achieving any legally defensible aim besides inflicting harm on large groups of people in the name of intolerant nationalism, served under the guise of ‘constitutional identity’. Such a turn is definitely a low point in the history of the Convention system, as it represents an unprovoked attack on the fundamentals of the Council of Europe legal order: the whole point of the Convention is not to allow ethno-nationalists in power to undo the dignity and human rights of clearly identifiable groups in the name of nothing else but such undoing by framing national statehood in opposition to convention rights and dignity of large groups of own population such states are proud to betray.
Recommended.