Since the Second World War, and especially over the past twenty years, the evolution of the transnational human rights regime centred on the Convention has been one of the most remarkable institutional transformations in Europe. It embodies a highly successful transnational legal system with far-reaching consequences for European and national governance. In its genesis, the Convention regime was the creature of state governments, which also determined with their decision-making its institutional remoulding over time. At the same time, though, its evolution into a ‘constitutional instrument of European public order’ has been a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Its construction and operation has involved dynamic processes of interaction engaging various national authorities but also non-state social actors, both individual and collective.

The present volume has sought to identify and explore the factors and conditions that determine the implementation and domestic impact of the ECtHR's judgments, and the variable patterns of influence that they exert upon national laws and policies. While national authorities promptly institute measures and pursue reforms called for by the ECtHR's judgments in some cases, they procrastinate or resist doing so in others. But variation is also qualitative, as the adopted measures in response to some judgments may be directly appropriate to the underlying rights issue or dispute at stake, or conversely, they may be extraneous or only tangentially related to it. By contextualising implementation in its domestic institutional and societal context, the contributions shed light on the multi-faceted ways in which the ECHR system and its Strasbourg-based judicial arm penetrate and impact upon national legal and political orders.

The Italian legal system, as in every contemporary state, is not an isolated system, impervious to international and supranational legal rules. Far from it, it is part of a complex and broader legal community, where international institutions, in relation to their competences, play an influential role within the domestic system. Regarding the protection of human rights, the most important international regime bearing sustained influence on the Italian system is the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter ECHR), which has introduced an indirect system of control over national law. To be sure, the European Union, in whose foundation Italy played a central role, has also created a very strong system of rights protection following the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU (including the introduction of new rights, such as those concerned with the environment and privacy, that do not expressly appear in the Italian Constitution). In spite of its restricted competence on economic matters, the importance of the EU as a system that also protects human rights in a wider sense has been growing. Nonetheless, the revolution in the review of human rights for Italians is directly linked to the ECHR and its jurisprudence. In fact, the individual right to petition to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) introduced to the Italian system the potential for individuals to directly address a rights review court. Nevertheless, the impact of the ECHR has been somewhat ambiguous and unclear, and its application by the domestic judiciary has not been immediate or uniform.

Romania's politics after its 1989 ‘entangled revolution’ can be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase was one of democratisation, following the only ‘revolution’ in central and eastern Europe which did not bring about a victory for anti-communists in the subsequent elections. Ion Iliescu, a former communist leader, and his populist National Salvation Front (NSF), which campaigned with slogans against party politics and Western capitalism, won an overwhelming victory after the first free but unfair elections in May 1990. The second phase was one of consolidation, which started with the peaceful departure from power of Iliescu in 1996, after he lost the elections to a coalition formed by anti-communists and deserters from his own party. The transition in the period 1990–6 saw highly contentious politics in Romania, as well as considerable civil unrest. The emerging civil society contested Iliescu, who in turn resorted to the help of vigilante miners to keep his opponents in check.

Following on from the legacies of the Ceausescu regime, this early contentious transition only increased the challenges to human rights protection. In the early 1990s Romania had the worst Freedom House scores of all former Warsaw Pact countries other than the former Soviet Union. In 1991, however, a Constitution was adopted, which reconfirmed Romania as a fused unitary and strongly centralised state. It included, however, an important limitation to the principle of sovereignty in connection with human rights.

The European Convention on Human Rights (hereafter ECHR, or Convention) has gained more importance within the multi-level system of judicial protection of human rights in Germany in recent years. The number of adverse judgments against Germany delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR, or Strasbourg Court) has been relatively low compared with other member states of the Council of Europe. In 2007 and 2008, the ECtHR found a violation of the Convention in seven and six judgments respectively. The number is even lower when one looks into the records before the Strasbourg Court became a permanent institution in 1998. However, since 2009 an increase of adverse judgments against Germany can be observed, with the ECtHR delivering twenty-nine adverse judgments in 2010 and thirty-one in 2011. Even though several of the judgments concerned repetitive cases, the Strasbourg Court has for the first time decided on significant topics like preventive detention in Germany. It also issued its first pilot judgment against Germany regarding excessive length of court proceedings, as well as judgments on freedom of expression and the protection of whistleblowers. The increase in adverse judgments, as well as the importance of the issues they involve, raise significant questions concerning the role of the ECtHR's judgments in the domestic system of human rights protection.

Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR or the Court) against Bulgaria have had a significant influence on introducing human rights principles into the domestic legal system since the late 1990s. A main reason for their strong influence was that these judgments substituted for the lack of a domestic human rights tradition. During the fifty years of communist rule, enforcement of individual rights through the courts was practically non-existent. Another reason for the strong domestic influence of the ECtHR's judgments is the lack of an individual complaints procedure before the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, which significantly limits its role in setting basic rights standards. In this barren domestic landscape, the case law of the ECtHR became quickly the major source of human rights law. Its judgments against Bulgaria brought up major human rights issues as well as structural defects in the domestic legal system, like the habeas corpus procedure, the legality and length of pre-trial detention and guarantees for fair judicial proceedings. They also raised a large variety of other issues, reflecting a fundamental divergence between the domestic legal system and European and international human rights law. Above all, these judgments prompted significant changes in domestic law, demonstrating the importance of the Strasbourg tribunal for the incorporation of human rights law in the domestic legal system.

Over the past couple of years, the European Convention of Human Rights (hereafter ECHR or Convention) and its judicial arm in Strasbourg have attracted renewed scholarly interest. The European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR or Court) is a paradigmatic instance of a transnational tribunal that fundamentally differs from an international court based on interstate processes: it allows individuals, but also other civil society actors, to raise claims against states, once they exhaust domestic remedies. Over time, poised between judicial restraint and activism, the Court has expansively interpreted the basic civil and political rights contained in the Convention, as well as scrutinising states' restrictions of those rights. Through individual petitions, a large array of state laws and practices, including areas that are sensitive for national interests and security, such as those pertaining to minorities and immigrants, have come under its purview. Through both dynamic interpretation and enforcement, the ECtHR has over time substantially upgraded and expanded human rights standards across established European democracies, and also vis-à-vis the democratising states of the ex-communist world. Having come a long way from its obscure origins in the 1950s, it is now increasingly constitutionalised and it is characterised as the single most important rights-protecting tribunal in the world.

Among the Convention's most remarkable characteristics is the obligation of national authorities to implement adverse judgments issued by the ECtHR. This involves a decentralised system of institutions and actors assigned responsibility for implementation at the national level, along with robust supervisory and enforcement mechanisms at the European level.

Courts have often served as an alternative arena for minorities to claim their rights when other avenues of political participation are closed or ineffective. While not specifically intended to protect minorities, the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR) has pre-eminently provided such an arena. Over time, it has developed a substantial case law related to minority rights by creatively, and at times expansively, interpreting the fundamental rights contained in the European Convention of Human Rights (hereafter ECHR or Convention). However, the ability of courts to uphold the rights of minorities and to influence how governments treat them has been a highly controversial issue. Such influence is contingent and varies across different issue areas and perhaps time periods. While judicial bodies lack the power to enforce their decisions, their authoritative interpretations of minority rights claims can have important legal and policy-related effects. This chapter examines the conditions under which the judgments of the ECtHR can promote rights-expansive legal reforms and domestic policy change pertaining to minorities by focusing on the case of Greece.

Small but salient historical minorities, religious and ethnic ones, remained excluded for most of the post-World War II period from Greece's political system and society. The preservation of emergency legislation which had been enacted during the civil war of the 1940s into the Cold War period undermined the enforcement of constitutional rights guarantees against state abuses, particularly for political or ethnic groups that were considered actually or potentially disloyal to the Greek nation.