Ed Bates

On 4 November 2010 the European Convention on Human Rights Celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. It has undergone a spectacular evolution since its creation in 1950. In recent times the European Court of Human Rights has been compared to a quasi-constitutional court for Europe in the field of human rights, and for some time the Convention has been viewed as a European Bill of Rights. The `coming of age' of the ECHR system in the late 1990s was marked by the entry into force of Protocol 11, creating a new, full-time Court. By contrast, those who first proposed a European human rights guarantee were driven by an ambition to put a place in collective pact to prevent the re-emergence of totalitarianism in `free' Europe. They were motivated by the memory of World War Two and the protection of human rights was seen in that light. When the Convention was opened for signature in 1950 it was viewed by many with scepticism and disappointment. The Convention system took many years to get established. In the mid-1960s doubts were expressed as to whether the Court had a future, and in the 1970s the Convention system of control faced a number of serious challenges. This book mainly focuses on the story of the evolution of the Convention during its first fifty years (up to 1998), although there is also a final chapter on the post-1998 situation. It reflects on the Convention's origins and charts the slow progress that it made during the 1950s and 1960s, before, in the late 1970s, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a series of landmark judgments which proved to be the foundation stones for the European Bill of Rights that we know today.

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