The impact of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on national law is considered the key cause of the effectiveness of the Strasbourg human rights regime. However, recent examples of backlash against the ECtHR show that compliance with its judgments is not obvious and that domestic institutions are not mere “transmission belts” of the Strasbourg jurisprudence. Even constitutional courts, until recently considered the major allies of the Strasbourg Court, have started to resist and sometimes even block the full implementation of ECtHR’s judgments. The aim of this paper is to explain why and how this happens. It does so in four steps. First, it explains that the Strasbourg system depends on domestic actors in two ways: (1) domestic institutions act as the “diffusers” of the Strasbourg case-law by establishing a general domestic rule respecting the demands of the ECtHR; and (2) they further shape this rule by its enforcement in the day-to-day practice and by doing so they fulfill the “filtering” role vis-à-vis the ECtHR. But this is an ideal scenario. The second part of this paper shows that in real life implementation of the ECtHR case-law is a multi-faceted process in which various actors with various interests engage with the Strasbourg jurisprudence. Third, this paper explains the role of the domestic judiciary in implementing the Strasbourg case law and places constitutional courts within the broader judicial context. Finally, it zeroes in on constitutional courts and their complicated relationship with the Strasbourg Court. More specifically, it argues that a constitutional court must be understood as one of the many domestic “meso-level” actors that interact with each other within the State (“macro-level”), but it also consists of several “micro-level” actors within the constitutional court itself. Only if we grasp all of these three levels we can see the full picture of how constitutional courts influence the dynamics of the implementation process.
