ECHR: THE PITY OF A SECULAR GOD AND THE STRENGHT OF A RELIGIOUS CONSTITUTIONALISM

Abstract

After seventy years from the final textual approval of the ECHR we are
experiencing a not so short period of continuous decreasing appeal for
International (multilateral) conventional law and for the European Union,
particularly. It followed a different phase of optimism about the European
integration: at the same time, the federalist part of the European parliament
battled hard to include the ECHR in the framework of the institutive treaties. The
attempt to conceive a European space of fundamental human rights, even wider
than the proper European Union's membership, has partially failed, but the
special need of it still stands tall in the material governance of Europe, in her
internal legal orders and the spiritual developing of a European popular
collective common sense. Regarded both as a programmatic conventional act
owning a specific formal jurisdiction and as the result of a theoretical legal
process, the ECHR perfectly shows a dual positive medal: the Christian religious
thought about mankind and the person herself, her rights combined into a
sympathetic net of human relationships, and the democratic implementation of a
still ongoing rationalist fulfilment for progressive social development. This
double coin is probably based on the Western conception of individuals but it
can survive to its ideological limits by an intercultural effective interpretation,
well oriented to rethink the traditional contribution of many legal cultures
(particularly included the Eastern European communitarian and radical
geographical identity). Seventy years ahead, we are still looking for what we
thought we had found and we had not: the untouchable but indispensable horizon
of a synthesis between freedom and responsibility.