The Transformation of Constitutional Law Through the European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

Only five years after the end of the Second World War terminating the complete disregard for human rights in one of the important European countries and in the occupied territories, the governments of European countries agreed on a European Bill of Rights and took the first steps toward collective enforcement of certain rights of the Universal Declaration, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. Evidently the Convention was a response to the totalitarian ideologies prevailing in national socialism but also to the communist ideology and practice governing the Soviet Union and the European countries behind the iron wall. Was the Convention intended to be more than a response and clarification of the fundamental principles which were well recognized in the constitutional structure of the free European states? If this is the case it should have had an impact on the legal system of member states. How far that impact would go was certainly not foreseen in 1950 or 1953 when the Convention came into force. By hindsight we may say that the establishment of the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights as judicial organs to enforce the Convention had something that is called "List der Vernunft" in German, a certain rule of reason, not fully understood by the drafters.

Keywords: WW2, human rights, europe, UN, ECHR, universal declaration, consitution