This post is adapted from the concluding remarks the author delivered at the ‘European Convention on Human Rights at 75: Transnational Perspectives and Global Interaction Conference’ held at the German Federal Ministry of Justice in Berlin on 9 October 2025

It is not very often that I get invitations to big birthday parties for human rights conventions, so it was an immense honour to deliver the concluding remarks at this event that examined the 75 years of the Convention from transnational and global perspectives in the presence of so many who breathe life to this Convention across Europe and the Presidents of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Court of Human and Peoples Rights.

This birthday party has a personal importance for me. I am, after all, alongside hundreds of thousands of others across the Council of Europe, a child of this Convention. I  started studying the ECHR when I was 25, now I am 50, so I have been studying the ECHR continuously for a quarter of a century. I have educated countless students and trained lawyers, police officers, public servants, prosecutors and members of civil society across the Council of Europe as a expert on the Convention. I have successfully defended victims of human rights violations — Selahattin Demirtaş before the Grand Chamber of the European Court, and Osman Kavala in the second ever infringement proceedings heard before the very same Grand Chamber. Sadly, Mr. Kavala has, this year, passed his eighth year of unlawful imprisonment, and his third case before the Court is, unfortunately, still pending.  I have also probably had thousands of hours of conversations with domestic judges, politicians, litigators and members of the public about the Convention.

Not all these conversations have been about agreeing with the Strasbourg Court, of course. But to this day, I celebrate the fact that our Convention has brought millions, from Edinburgh and Dublin to Ankara and Berlin, from Tiblisi to Lampedusa and Porto, closer together to take part in a shared conversation about human rights as the standard of treatment of all human beings.

So, how has this conference taken stock of 75 years of the Convention? We have delved into very wide range of rights issues, concrete cases and contemporary challenges, from the climate crisis to migration and artificial intelligence. This was to be expected. When you study, work and advocate with the ECHR, this is what you do. Even though the ECHR is by far the shortest human rights instrument we have in international law, even with its additional protocols, it has always enabled us to address a broad range of rights struggles of a broad range of groups and individuals across Europe. And this it also what happened at this celebratory conference.

Three points are, however, notable. The panel on migration overran by 30 minutes. The panel on the climate crisis was hopeful. The panel on artificial intelligence barely referenced the ECHR and focussed more on broad regulatory challenges.  In this way, the conference was a barometer of where the Convention’s contributions to protections of human rights are most contested, where they receive strong support (at least amongst the conference participants)  and where they are – at least currently – limited.

In the opening panel, Silvia Steininger asked three questions. What are we celebrating? What are the big troubles of the Convention? What is everyone’s wish on its 75th birthday? In my concluding remarks, let me take these in turn.

What are we celebrating?

We are celebrating many things. This is what this conference mostly clearly revealed. First and importantly, we are not only celebrating a treaty, but an ideal, a common value, a common standard of achievement. Second, we are not only celebrating 75 years of commitment to common values, but we are also celebrating that we have built and sustained a set of institutional arrangements to support these values, a human rights court and a supportive ecosystem of Council of Europe institutions and domestic institutions. Let me underline that we have good reasons to criticise the workings of all these institutions, but the fact that we have institutions to support a few words on paper at all is cause for celebration. Thirdly, we are celebrating this Convention because it directly links human rights and democracy and because it has a Court that declares that democracy is the only political system that is compatible with human rights protections. Fourthly, we are celebrating how, through this Convention, we defend the independence and impartiality of domestic courts.

But I think we were not only celebrating how much this Convention has really supported and improved the domestic  institutions of democracy and rule of law across Europe for 75 years. We are also celebrating how thousands of victims of human rights violations were truly heard for the first time, thanks to this Court.  The European Court has been a crucial site to listen, recognise and deliver justice to victims of human rights violations; in Germany, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Moldova, and in all member countries.

Finally, as a teacher of the Convention, I am also celebrating the ability to build a community of scholars, lawyers, judges and prosecutors, police officers, national human rights institutions, parliamentary human rights committees, politicians and more, even though we all come from very different legal and socio-economic backgrounds with different legal systems and speaking different languages.  And I think that’s also really, really worth celebrating.  The Convention and its practice have given all of us a common language and the ability to be part of a collective politics for human rights on an equal footing.

What are the big troubles of the ECHR?

But, the Convention has a lot of challenges. Things age and decline; so can the Convention. Let me outline what I see as the three major structural challenges for the Convention at the age of 75.

The first challenge is: there are political and social movements, governments and corporations (think of Big Tech) in Europe and around the world that do not care about or care for the European Convention – or about human rights for that matter – anymore.  They see the Convention as a relic of a past, an old instrument for an old world that is simply not relevant for the new geo-political realities of a new world.  People thinking that the Convention is part of an old world, and is an old language is a serious challenge. The Convention is also not alone in facing this challenge. All human rights actors and institutions are confronting this challenge today.

The second challenge, which we frequently hear in debates about human rights and migration, is that there is again a group of governments and political and social movements that does not like that human rights are protected by international laws. They would like human rights to be anchored in a national ethos and space, so they would like to talk about German human rights, British human rights, Turkish human rights. So this is a demand to close the door to imagining human rights as a common standard of achievement in Europe or globally.  This challenge particularly affects the ECHR as it aims to constantly define common standards of achievement in conversation with political, societal and technological developments in European societies.

Finally, and perhaps linked to the first and second challenges I identified, there is the challenge of the Convention and its institutions trying to keep those who do not care for it and its promise of common standards happy. This final challenge is about how the Convention adapts to its new political environment and how far it takes its principle of subsidiarity in interpreting and applying human rights and, in turn, whether the Convention itself becomes the tool of legitimation for the hollowing out of human rights and democracy. Which then begs the question of whether it is worth having a human rights court whose only concern is to protect its own institutional survival?

I think across issues, these final challenges that I raise are probably going to the challenges this court is going to face for another 25 years.

What do I wish for the ECHR’s 75th birthday?

I have three wishes.

First, I would like to see the Convention and the Court survive these structural challenges, and I would like to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

My second wish is for a new political consensus about why the ECHR is a really important treaty and why the institutional architecture built around a human rights court and its supporting institutions is really valuable. I do not think that only reminding people about the history of the Convention is going to cut it. So, we need a new political consensus around the ECHR with the new generation of publics across Europe. We need this along with a new language to defend the Convention in a new world.

My final wish is that the guardian of the Convention, the European Court of Human Rights, faces all these challenges, that it engages in doctrinal innovation rather than doctrinal toleration. We are living in an age that demands not only doctrinal resilience, but also doctrinal innovation to address the challenge of the slow erosion of democracies and the capture of human rights laws to advance anti-pluralist and deeply discriminatory purposes as well as the broader dimensions of the social, economic, legal, and political contexts in which human rights violations unfold. So my final wish is that the Convention does not become a façade for human rights.