What is the Strasbourg Effect?
Strasbourg, France is the home of the European Court of Human Rights, or ECHR. The ECHR is the Council of Europe’s principal organ for interpreting the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Personal Freedoms. In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court Justices have attended numerous international conferences with their counterparts from the ECHR, the European Court of Justice (the judicial body of the European Union), and members of constitutional courts from other nations. Notably, Justices O’Connor and Kennedy are among the most enthusiastic participants in such conferences, and for many years Justice Kennedy has taught a summer course comparing American and European approaches to human rights in Salzburg, Austria. What happens at these conferences? Increasingly, judges from Europe and the rest of the world have criticized the American justice system for, among other things, its reliance on the death penalty – with the execution of the mentally retarded coming in for sp
