How conservative groups fight liberal groups in the European Court of Human Rights through shaming and blaming strategies

Although scholars have expended much effort on tracing the litigation activity of conservative interest groups and entrepreneurs, they have focused almost exclusively on the US, excepting only a few studies of Europe on religious matters. This paper is the first to analyze conservative litigation activity before the European Court of Human Rights concerning moral issues such as abortion, medically assisted procreation, surrogacy, LGTBQ+ rights, euthanasia, prostitution, (online) pornography, and hate speech. We find that in Europe conservative strategic advocacy does not follow the strategies used by American conservative organizations; rather, it is threefold in aspect: (1) a defensiveness that runs interference against complaints lodged by liberal civil society, using mainly procedural means, with a view to hindering their purposes and weakening their judicial influence; (2) an aggressiveness and innovativeness that games multifarious ways to blame and shame liberals, with a view to discrediting them publicly; or exposing them for counterattack to influential right-wing political parties or friendly member states of multilateral bodies, especially the Committee of Ministers and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; or by alerting the media; (3) a consequentialist of reasoning that consists to pinpoint and emphasise the contradictions of some liberal legal arguments. Using a legal and socio-legal methodology (interviews, analysis of legal documents and jurisprudence, press review) to analyze their activities, we find their strategies do not mainly rely on legal arguments arising from the European Convention on Human Rights. We propose, therefore, a new approach to the study of cause lawyering and strategic litigation, in devising the novel concept of “critical litigant” to reflect these interfering, blaming and shaming, and consequentialist strategies, which differ notably from what the socio-legal literature tends to conclude about the social objectives and effects of cause litigation. This concept of “critical litigant” aids in theorizing how powerful private actors, driven by moral and even religious interests, take creative and critical initiatives to expose and discredit their opponents and decrease their influence over judicial output.