Alain Zysset – författare

The European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) has been relatively neglected in the field of normative human rights theory. This book aims to bridge the gap between human rights theory and the practice of the ECHR. In order to do so, it tests the two overarching approaches in human rights theory literature: the ethical and the political, against the practice of the ECHR ‘system’. The book also addresses the history of the ECHR and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as an international legal and political institution.The book offers a democratic defence of the authority of the ECtHR. It illustrates how a conception of democracy – more specifically, the egalitarian argument for democracy developed by Thomas Christiano on the domestic level – can illuminate the reasoning of the Court, including the allocation of the margin of appreciation on a significant number of issues. Alain Zysset argues that the justification of the authority of the ECtHR – its prominent status in the domestic legal orders – reinforces the democratic process within States Parties, thereby consolidating our status as political equals in those legal and political orders.

The book offers the first systematic account of the European Court of Human Rights' actual and potential response to the wave of authoritarian populism consolidating across Council of Europe states. It develops an original framework combining philosophical, social-scientific and legal analysis. The book first develops the claim that authoritarian populism is characterised by a severe distortion of democracy and a corrupt rule of law. Drawing on these insights, the book points to the infrastructural erosion of Convention rights, highlighting the limits of the Court's 'democratic society' in the media, judicial, and electoral domains. Taking into account the Court's subsidiary position, the book demonstrates how the Court's proportionality test can and should be enhanced to better detect and respond to infrastructural erosion across these areas.