Persuading the Conscience of Europe: Third-Party Interventions and Decision-Making in the European Court of Human Rights

When courts are tasked with clarifying and developing the interpretations of legal provisions, their judgments have consequences well beyond the parties to each case. Judgments’ potentially far-reaching consequences create incentives for various types of third parties to intervene in judicial proceedings to influence their outcomes. For courts, such third-party interventions may provide valuable information both about likely societal consequences and political reactions stemming from their judgments. Yet, third-party interventions hardly provide courts with neutral information and the conditions under which courts find such interventions persuasive remain unclear. We employ novel data on third-party interventions and judicial decisions in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to study the extent to which different types of member states and civil-society actors are successful in influencing the development of human rights case law in Europe. Our study contributes to ongoing debates about the responsiveness of the ECtHR to its political environment and the ability of different societal interests to influence the construction of supranational law.