Keeping Rights at Home: British Conceptions of Rights and Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights

The United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been historically fraught. This paper examines this relationship with a view to understanding how the UK’s conceptions of human rights protection, both domestically and in Europe, shape its willingness to comply with ECtHR judgments. The paper will argue that the UK maintains a sense of a distinctly ‘British’ – as opposed to ‘European’ – legal culture, based on principles of parliamentary sovereignty and the common law. In doing so, it explores an important analytical gap in terms of understanding the relationship between compliance behaviour and international law, as current theoretical explanations for norms influencing state behaviour do not necessarily translate into effective practice of the law and protection of human rights.