New publication: Coercive Human Rights and the Forgotten History of the Council of Europe's Report on Decriminalisation
CAHR lecturer Mattia Pinto has recently published a new article on the Modern Law Review, entitled ‘Coercive Human Rights and the Forgotten History of the Council of Europe's Report on Decriminalisation’.
The article, published in Open Access, imagines what it would entail for the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to develop robust case law on decriminalisation.
To do so, the article returns to a largely forgotten moment in 1980, when the Council of Europe adopted a Report on Decriminalisation.
This Report is an extraordinary publication. It analysed the costs of criminal justice; placed decriminalisation within a broader abolitionist perspective; and made suggestions on how to overcome dysfunctions arising from abolishing criminalisation.
The Report is not without limitations. But by engaging with its recommendations, the article sheds light on a framework for approaching criminalisation cases differently and more coherently, a framework the ECtHR could have taken up but never did.
By showing that today's ‘coercive human rights doctrine’ is not inevitable as we may think, the article advance decriminalisation as a possible alternative to present arrangements that is not just theoretical but also grounded in the history of human rights.