Landbouw & Veeteelt·Recht.nl·27 jul 2023

European Court of Human Rights: moving away from open judicial balancing review

To fight the Covid-19 pandemic, many States introduced measures that restricted fundamental rights, ranging from procedural rights to the freedom of movement and the right to personal autonomy. It is expected that many cases concerning such rights infringements eventually will come before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) - which used to be famous for its open judicial balancing review. However, nowadays the Court seems to prefer analogy-and precedent-based reasoning, often combined with procedural review. This article maps out this development - using ECtHR�s Covid-19 case law to date as a casestudy.