The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is an international court empowered to interpret the European Convetion on Human Rights via its rulings. On its own, however, the ECtHR has no formal power to force the states parties to comply with its judgments. Accordingly, the functioning of the European human rights regime depends heavily on the implementation of the ECtHR's case-law at the national level. The recent examples of domestic discontent and non-compliance with the ECtHR's judgments (culminating in explicit backlash against the ECtHR) show that the relations between the ECtHR and the domestic arena have been crucial for the functioning of the European system of human rights protection.
The aim of this paper is to depict the structure of the de facto relations between the Strasbourg level and the national level of the European human rights regime. The paper draws from the pluralist narrative of the European human rights regime and builds upon the pluralists' account, according to which the structure of the European human rights regime is not hierarchical, but rather heterarchical and “liquid”. The paper, however, goes beyond this statement and combines the pluralist approaches with the compliance theories focusing on domestic politics in order to make the pluralist narrative more nuanced and accurate. As a result, the paper provides a framework for the study of the implementation process of the ECtHR's case-law at the national level. It shows that the structure of the relations between the European Court of Human Rights and the national actors is open-ended and “liquid” in two respects – (1) as to the process of the ECtHR's implementation, i.e. as to the interactions among different actors in terms of the ECtHR's judgments implementation, and (2) as to the final outcome of these processes, i.e. as to the level of (non)compliance.
