Tracing the Impact of the European Court of Human Rights’ Judgments on the Intensity of Parliamentary Processes in Norway

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) urges national parliaments to engage more frequently and intensely with human rights issues. Is procedural review of parliaments by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) facilitating this promotional agenda? This paper is a first attempt to try and understand whether, how and when the ECtHR’s assessments of parliamentary processes lead to changes in the performance of parliaments. The paper first theorizes the relationship between the level of mention of parliament in a judgment (independent variable) and the intensity of parliamentary involvement in its implementation (dependent variable). The scales of measurement for both the independent and the dependent variable are generated from a previous review of the case law of the ECtHR. The primary causal mechanism is argued to consist of the structural connections the executive has with the ECtHR, and the scope the executive has to influence the functioning of parliament, combined with a motivation to comply with the ECtHR’s judgments. The paper tests the theory through tracing the processes of several adverse ECtHR judgments against Norway: Følgero, TV Vest, and Lindheim. Norway is a most likely case study on the basis of the centripetal nature of its political institutions, which are argued to channel good process and cooperation amongst the branches of government. Attention is given to evidence of correlation between the way parliament is mentioned in the cases and the role parliament has undertaken during implementation. This leads to a detailed analysis of the implementation pathways of the judgments, focusing on nodes at which the guiding theory would expect certain indicators to be present.