This May, Oxford University Press will publish Courts and Consociations: Human Rights versus Power-Sharing by Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University, Belfast & University of Michigan Law School) and Brendan O’Leary (Queen’s University, Belfast). The publisher’s description follows.
Consociations are power-sharing arrangements, increasingly used to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts. Current examples include Belgium, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Burundi, and Iraq. Despite their growing popularity, they have begun to be challenged before human rights courts as being incompatible with human rights norms, particularly equality and non-discrimination.
Courts and Consociations examines the use of power-sharing agreements, their legitimacy, and their compatibility with human rights law. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justified to preserve peace and the integrity of political settlements.
In three critical cases, the European Court of Human Rights has considered equality challenges to important consociational practices, twice in Belgium and then in Sejdic and Finci v Bosnia regarding the constitution established for Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Agreement. The Court’s decision in Sejdic and Finci has significantly altered the approach it previously took to judicial review of consociational arrangements in Belgium. This book accounts for this change and assess its implications. The problematic aspects of the current state of law are demonstrated. Future negotiators in places riven by potential or actual bloody ethnic conflicts may now have less flexibility in reaching a workable settlement, which may unintentionally contribute to sustaining such conflicts and make it more likely that negotiators will consider excluding regional and international courts from reviewing these political settlements.
Providing a clear, accessible introduction to both the political use of power-sharing settlements and the human rights law on the issue, this book is an invaluable guide to all academics, students, and professionals engaged with transitional justice, peace agreements, and contemporary human rights law.
Pussy Riot Goes to Strasbourg
For European scholars, it will be crucial to understand how the vocal and active presence of the ROC in the courts will influence the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). I have already shown that the ROC was a key player in the Lautsi case on the display of the crucifix in Italian public schools. After the first decision in Lautsi, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the ROC’s Department of External Church Relations, clearly expressed his opinion–on the judgment, the Court, and the need for action by religious groups–in a letter to the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone:
“We consider this practice of the European Court of Human Rights to be an attempt to impose radical secularism everywhere despite the national experience of church-state relations. The above mentioned decision is not the only one in the practice of the Court, which has increasingly shown an anti-Christian trend. Taking into account the fact that the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have clearly lost touch with legal and historical reality in which most of the Europeans live, while the Court itself has turned into an instrument of promoting an ultra-liberal ideology, we believe it very important that religious communities in Europe should be involved in a discussion concerning its work”.
For these reasons, it will be interesting to see how the ECtHR decides the recently-lodged case of the Pussy Riot punk band (above), some of whose members were arrested after performing a “punk prayer” in one of the most important Russian churches. Maria Alekhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Natalia Tolokonniva were in fact sentenced to two years in prison on the charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. The complaint at the ECtHR, filed one month ago, alleges that the group’s conviction amounts to a violation Convention’s guarantees of freedom of speech, the right to liberty and security, the prohibition of torture and the right to a fair trial.
If the cases moves forward, it promises to be an important one in many regards: both for the legal arguments and standards that the Court will apply to balance (or not) the different rights at stake, but also for the position religious groups, like the ROC, take in any third party interventions before the Court.
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Posted in Commentary, Pasquale Annicchino
Tagged European Court of Human Rights, Pussy Riot, Russian Orthodox Church