Proactive Prevention: Denmark’s Domestic Practices of Human Rights Compliance

Abstract

Fueled by an ambition to solve the puzzle of the stark contrast between Denmark’s increasingly negative presence in the international press and its leading performance in European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) compliance statistics, this article presents the results of a mixed-method study of the country’s domestic human rights’ protection and implementation practices. The story that emerges is not one of compliance, but of proactive prevention with a tinge of strategic risk-taking and prompt implementation. The majority of the Danish action within the compliance sphere takes place before one can even talk about compliance—domestically before the international spotlight is prompted to shine on Denmark by an adverse judgment against it. The article shows how each branch of power has an idiosyncratic way of working towards the prevention of human rights’ breaches. Yet, domestic prevention and international statistics say little about the quality of implementation and human rights’ protection. The article offers a concrete illustration of the blind spots of compliance data in the absence of qualitative research related to domestic practices and proves that there are lessons to be learned from studying even the most exemplary compliers. This makes the Danish case study an important contribution to the broader literature on the ways in which the ECtHR influences states other than through the implementation of judgments. Importantly, it also shows that while the proactive prevention of adverse ECtHR judgments can mean the same as the proactive prevention of human rights’ breaches, this is not always the case.

Keywords: compliance, Denmark, ECtHR, implementation, prevention, Scandinavia