Articles in EHRLR

Three issues of the European Human Rights Law Review of 2011 (on which issues I did not yet report) include a number of articles on the European Convention on Human Rights. Here is an overview. In issue 3:

* Sophie Briant, Dialogue, diplomacy and defiance: prisoners' voting rights at home and in Strasbourg.

In issue 4:

* Maria Suchkova, An analysis of the institutional arrangements within the Council of Europe and within certain Member States for securing the enforcement of judgments

In issue 5:

* Baroness Hale, Common Law and Convention Law: The Limits to Interpretation.

* David Mead, "Don't make us get a warrant... we only want a quick look in your husband's shed": The Article 8 Issues Raised by the Domestic Legal Framework on Police Entries and Searches by Consent.

* Max Schaefer, Al-Skeini and the Elusive Parameters of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction.

The latter issue also includes an article by the Court's president Sir Nicholas Bratza, noted here earlier.

Blog on ECHR and Poland

The ever-expanding blogosphere, specifically the one on human rights, has a new offshoot: Etpcz Blog, a blog on the European Convention on Human Rights in Polish. The blog was created two months ago by Robert Rybski of Warsaw University. Its aim is to cover Polish aspects of the ECHR for a Polish audience and in doing so making the Court's case-law more accessible to Polish practioners. Congratulations, Robert, and keep up the good work!

Sending us feedback is now much easier!

Posted by Mariko Suzuki, Google News Strategist

Do you have any feedback or suggestions you would like to share with the Google News Team? We always love to hear from you, so we made submitting feedback much easier.

Simply click the “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of Google News pages. The Google Feedback gadget will appear, and you can leave us general comments, problem reports or feature suggestions. The feedback gadget will also help you send us a screenshot if you want to draw our attention to a specific aspect of the site. Use the tool to highlight an area relevant to your feedback and black out any personal information before submitting the screenshot to us.

Although we won’t be able to reply to your comments individually, your feedback will help us create a better Google News experience. This tool will be launching worldwide, beginning with the U.S. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

New Academic ECHR Publications

At the start of the new year a very wide range of articles and publications on the European Convention and the European Court (see the overview below). A very good year to all readers!

* Yonatan Lupu and Erik Voeten, 'Precedent in International Courts: A Network Analysis of Case Citations by the European Court of Human Rights', British Journal of Political Science (December 2011).

Why and how do international courts justify decisions with citations to their own case law? We argue that, like domestic review courts, international courts use precedent at least in part to convince ‘lower’ (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of judgements. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view, which are examined through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. First, the Court cites precedent based on the legal issues in the case, not the country of origin. Second, the Court is more careful to embed judgements in its existing case law when the expected value of persuading domestic judges is highest. These findings contribute to a developing literature that suggests international and domestic review courts develop their authority in similar ways.

* Maria Zhurnalova-Juppunov, 'Religious Displays at Public Schools – Courts, Crucifixes and Masters of Identities', Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, Volume 18.

Abstract: This contribution compares the judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Lautsi v. Italy with the decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court in the Classroom Crucifix case. An examination of the way that the courts dealt with the common issues of state neutrality in education, parents’ rights to direct the religious education of their children, students’ right to religious freedom, as well as of the consistency of the rulings with relevant case law, reveals that the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber rendered a judgment open to criticism on a number of grounds. It erroneously conflated state action interfering with the applicant’s rights with the exercise of some ‘collective’ rights and liberties. The mis-characterization of the crucifix as a ‘passive symbol’ led the ECtHR to trivialize or disregard the effects of the crucifix on dissenting students and the state neutrality mandate in public education. Finally the judgment is not consistent with the relevant case law of the Court and the application of the doctrine of the margin of appreciation has served to weaken its role as Europe’s ‘ fundamental rights protector’, seeming to be a means through which the Court has gracefully given in to ‘popular sentiment’. The contribution concludes by offering a ‘pluralist approach’ as a legislative framework for regulating the display of religious symbols in public schools

* Paul Johnson, 'Heteronormativity and the European Court of Human Rights', Law and Critique (January 2012).

This article examines a recent judgment by the European Court of Human Rights (E.B. v France) that upheld the complaint of a homosexual woman who alleged that her application for authorization to adopt a child had been refused by domestic French authorities on the grounds of her sexual orientation. I argue that the judgment constitutes an innovative and atypical legal consideration of, and challenge to, the heteronormative social relations of contemporary European societies. After exploring the evidence presented by the applicant, and the Court’s interpretation of it, I argue that in order to reach its judgment it was necessary for the Court to make a significant departure from its established jurisprudence in relation to sexual orientation. An essential element of this involved the adoption of a distinctive critical approach, strongly resonant with aspects of ‘queer theory’, which focused attention on the social, cultural and political construction of normative heterosexuality. Whilst a number of commentators have assessed the importance of the judgment in terms of its evolution of ‘gay rights’ in the area of family life, I argue that the Court’s reconceptualized ‘theoretical’ understanding of, and critical approach to, heteronormativity offers the potential to expand the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights across a number of areas of social life—in marriage, public assembly, freedom of expression, as well as family life—where non-heterosexuals continue to face discrimination in contemporary Europe.

New Book on Court After Protocol 14

Last year in May, the University of Fribourg organised a conference on the European Court's future after Protocol 14. The conference book, edited by Samantha Besson, is out now and is entitled 'La Cour européenne des droits de l'homme après le Protocole 14 / The European Court of Human Rights after Protocol 14'. It includes contributions by Luzius Wildhaber, Helen Keller, Philip Leach, Elisabeth Lambert Abdelgawad and many others. This is the abstract:

After many years of uncertainty, Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights finally entered into force on 1st June, 2010. It brings about some important and well-known amendments to the European Court of Human Rights’ functioning. Those reforms should help the Court deal with some of the serious difficulties and backlog it has been facing to date. The Protocol also generates its own set of new difficulties, however, as many procedural and substantive issues were not settled by the updated version of the Rules of court and will have to be addressed in practice.

Moreover, as foreseen by certain specialists, many other fundamental reforms are needed to make the Court more effective and a Protocol 15 is allegedly already under consideration. The present publication has two aims. It aims, first of all, at developing a general assessment of the main improvements to the Court’s functioning one year after the entry into force of the Protocol, but also at identifying some issues where further reforms are needed. A second aim is to examine the Declaration and Action Plan that was adopted on 19th February, 2010 at the Interlaken Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights and under the Swiss Chairmanship of the Council of Europe. Different measures listed in the Action Plan are discussed and suggestions made as to how to best implement them.

Rolling Ball, Facing Book

Hello again! By now you might all be back in the swing of things after the festive period. Personally, I took things a little easy in-between Christmas and Sylwester – recovering from the former lead into preparations for the latter, and the time in-between seemed ideal for catching up on some R&R.

But of course it’s all over for now (he said, thinking of the three-day weekend that starts tomorrow here in Poland (R.I.P. Polish GDP)), and it’s time to set our sights on new goals and plans. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, and long-term readers will know I’m great at promising exciting new articles and then totally failing to deliver them. So let’s just say that in 2012 I will be trying harder to stock the shelves here more often. 

To get the ball rolling, let’s catch up on some of the action that’s occurred on our Facebook wall since late October’s post on prepositions. First of all, there was quite a lot of follow-up to that item, and I’m going to roll it all into one proper article, Part II of the main thing. But plenty else of interest also occurred, including:

Word order
Bad: You can get here X about all the exciting things the city has to offer.
Good: You can get X here about all the exciting things the city has to offer.
Good: Here you can/will get/find X on all the exciting things the city has to offer. :-) 

Where X = advice, information, help etc. “here” could also be “at the (place)”, e.g. You can get/find advice on English grammar at the school/Bad Article etc.

Bottom line: get-noun-place

Pronoun agreement
In a Lingua Franca article by Geoffrey Pullum, the weighty role of opinion in the interpretation of grammar rules, particularly gender pronouns, is brought to somewhat humorous light. Bad Article reader Adam from Warsaw subsequently thought that, “... language reflects social norms, although it usually takes some time. That’s why ‘you’ began to be used in the singular, and the polite 2nd person in Polish is actually the 3rd. Such things must have been perceived as incorrect or weird, until they became the norm.”

Countable nouns
I often see plural noun ‘travels’ used where ‘trip’ or ‘journey’ should be. For example, ‘From the central train station, there are many travels you can make’, or ‘Travels on Bus 172 during this period will take approx. 20 minutes longer than normal.’

Let’s agree on this as a simple rule of thumb: Unless we’re using the idiomatic phrasing of, for example, ‘If you see a newspaper on your travels, please buy it for me’, always remember to use ‘trip/s’, ‘journey/ies’ or ‘travel times’ (particularly good for public transport notices). Ok?

Translating menus, food and dish names
A bigger topic than we covered over there, this is something we can pencil-in for a full discussion later on. I forget what now, but something in a menu translation made me explode with rage. Possibly a mushroom name or a fish name, both of which tend to get mangled quite ferociously on the way from Polish into English. :D

Phrasing
BAD: ...in the course of the last several decades...
GOOD: ...in the course of the last few decades...

‘last few’ is a self-contained unit; ‘few’ is not interchangeable with ‘several’ in this phrasing. There’s probably more to say on this subject, but this is the burning heart of it.

Wot I do
The Society for Editors and Proofreaders put up a good thing – it’s only half a page long, but it illustrates precisely and with greater clarity I can usually muster, what exactly it is that I do with our translations. Check it out here.

 So, that was most of it. There’s a sizable chunk of preposition debate too, which as I said, I will fillet and fatten, strengthen and flatten, rate and berate into another exciting instalment of... The Bad Article! *dramatic music, flash of lightning*

Announcing the 2012 Google News elections section

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Who just endorsed whom? What do the latest polls say? How much money did they raise this quarter? Keeping up with the 2012 elections in the U.S. and staying abreast of breaking developments can be quite a task in today’s fast-paced news cycle.

So today, we’re excited to continue our tradition of supporting you during elections season. Google News is launching an Elections section on its homepage which will organize and present elections coverage as it grows through the general election -- Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

The Elections section will be visible by default for all US users and will be located beneath the Health section. It will bring readers the latest and most relevant news stories, using all of the ranking intelligence that users have come to expect of Google. You should also check out Google’s official elections page, YouTube’s collection of candidate videos, and the elections Trends Dashboard to find out more about how people are interacting with the elections online.