Introduction

After the Second World War the community of nations undertook to make human rights a common ideal for humanity. This ideal was enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, adopted in 1945, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed the universality and indivisibility of human rights. The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 was the Council of Europe’s first treaty and is its greatest achievement. The Convention makes express reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations, but is broader in scope since it includes a monitoring system. It has both a political and a legal dimension:

• its political dimension lies in the fact that it is the common denominator of the European democracies and serves as a standard for accession to the Council of Europe;

• its legal dimension consists in the guarantee that it affords of international judicial protection of human rights, based on clear definitions of the rights concerned and on supervisory machinery. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg deals with complaints of breaches of the Convention lodged either by states parties against other signatory states or by individual applicants, whatever their nationality, who deem themselves to be the victim of a violation of Convention rights by a signatory state. However, before bringing their case before the Court, applicants must first have exhausted all the legal remedies available in the country concerned. Nevertheless, fifty years after the drafting of the Convention there are still violations of human rights.

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