Brief overview of the paper and its main findings

this paper examines if European court of human rights has been limiting rights rather than expanding by favouring the respondent state. the researchers call this trend as walking back dissent. and the paper found that due to political pressure European court of human rights in fact did limit human rights by overturning prior judgement. and this walking back dissent becomes more common in European court of human rights. the methodology used is analysis of opinions of member of grand chamber of European court of human rights within a timespan between 1998 and 2018. the main finding is that the court is overturning prior judgement in a regressive direction. the cause of this is shown as opposition and political pressure from member countries.

Major and minor points

first of all this is a legal research. this is a qualitative research. this is done in a quantitative manner by showing graphs by plotting number of judgement. concluding court's regressive order simply by how many cases prior judgements are overturned is not a fair conclusion since judgements depends on many factors.

the cause of court's overturning prior ruling is shown here as political pressure from member countries regarding court's order. but this may not be the real reason of court's order. courts did not change their order because one party shows discontent. showing this political pressure as cause of walking back dissent means questioning the impartiality of court. in india also there are many influential parties who are not happy with court's order. but court here dont change their prior ruling to please the parties.

its main weakness is judging a court's intention from the order it passes by comparing minority opinion as against majority opinion. this means if 8 out of 10 judges say yes and only 2 judges say no, you come in to a negative conclusion about court and vice versa. this is absolutely ridiculous. minority never shows any intent of any entity. it is a generalization of legal mindset of the court.

the application of this ridiculous methodology shows that in how many cases minority opinion is against overturning of prior judgement either explicitly or implicity. and then table the number of cases of walking back dissent and then plot them into graph and come into conclusion that court is walking backward.

what the researcher should investigate is the reason and facts behind those judgements. these facts are : facts of the case, evidence, witness, laws, investigations, conduct of parties etc. they together influence majority of judges to form opinions about overturning priot ruling. they are the only causes of a judicial ruling in any court of the world. political pressure is not a cause of judicial ruling anywhere in the world.

this study actually stigmatize court's impartial images by judging a court its opinion. this is a very common practice. in india court ruled in favour of women in a women crime case, not because of political pressure but because of law. but people always say that court is bending towards women. this is a very bad way of judging a court by its judgement. Conflicts of interest

Do you have any conflicts of interest here?

i do not have any conflict of interest here. i dont know the author(s).