Give a Court an Inch and It Will Take a Yard? The Exercise of Jurisdiction over Incidental Issues

This article seeks to clarify how international courts and tribunals should decide whether to exercise jurisdiction over incidental issues. It considers such issues incidental, which would fall outside the subject-matter jurisdiction of an international court or tribunal if submitted separately, but which courts rule upon to resolve disputes falling within their jurisdiction. International courts and tribunals have employed diverse approaches to decide whether to exercise jurisdiction over incidental issues. This contribution will assess their decisions to distil what criteria are best suited to ensure the effectiveness of the underlying treaty while taking into account the fundamental importance of state consent for judicial dispute settlement. It concludes that the necessity to exercise jurisdiction over the incidental issue and the nature of the issue should be the guiding criteria for international courts and tribunals, while the character of the jurisdictional basis may serve as supplementary criterion.

‘To me, fair friend, you can never be old’, William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 104’: ECHR at 70 Rudolf Bernhardt Lecture, 202

This article undertakes a survey of the changes in the structure of the interpretive doctrines of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) over time in an exploration of the aging of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or the Convention) on its 70th anniversary. It argues that the Court’s interpretive doctrines that seek to give due deference to national rights traditions, canons and institutions have become increasingly pervasive in the Court’s procedural and substantive case law in the last two decades. This, in particular, has come at a loss for interpretative doctrines that interpret the Convention as a practical and effective living pan-European instrument. This argument is built in four parts. First it offers a defence of why a study of the interpretive doctrines of the Court over time is a good proxy for studying the ECHR’s ageing process. In the second part, it discusses the rich doctrinal forms of due deference and effective interpretation in the case law of the Court – both young and mature. Part three explains how the judicialisation and expansion of the European human rights system in late 1990 s transitioned to a more heightened and sophisticated focus on due deference doctrines in the Court’s case law. Finally, part four examines whether the recent judicial innovations under the Court’s Article 18 case law and the widely celebrated success of increased ownership of the Convention by domestic courts can act as counter points to the argument that the effective interpretation principle has suffered a loss as the Convention has aged, concluding that none of this may offset the fact that the Convention at 70 is more conservative in spirit than its younger self.