Authors

Agnieszka Kubal¹;  ¹ Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

The popularity of the ECHR among Eastern European and Russian citizens, who have taken to heart the right to individual petition is unprecedented. Yet a great majority of these individual petitions – over 90% – fail to reach a judgment or are declared inadmissible by the Court. This leads to a fundamental question – if human rights claims are made, but never materialize, what are the consequences? What does it mean for the individuals mobilising human rights in Eastern Europe and Russia – the lawyers, applicants, judges, NGO activists, state legal counsels – and the broader development of these societies? What issues are being marginalized by the Court through rejecting claims, which reflect the function of law as a power mechanism? Who are the applicants and what are their causes that are ultimately silenced by a legal venue which often represents the last resort for seeking justice? Grappling with these questions comparatively and examining the consequences of the miscarriages of human rights justice for the actors involved, the paper relies on the framework of relational legal consciousness (Chua and Engel 2019) highlighting the law's potential to simultaneously empower and alienate (Hertogh 2018, Kubal 2023, 2024).