Fundamental Rights In Europe

Abstract

Abstract On 4 November 2000 the Council of Europe celebrated the half-centenary of its Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms. Few would have believed it possible on the day the Convention was signed in Rome by the foreign ministers of its founding member states that by the turn of the century the Convention would have become the most effective and influential international human rights instrument in the world. Over the last twenty-five years especially, the Convention has emerged as ‘a benchmark for the democratic states of Europe ⃛ providing a basis for a European public law’. Few, too, could have dared hope after the horrors of the Second World War and the partition of Europe which immediately followed that by 2000 the scale of the Council of Europe’s activities would have grown to embrace forty-one European member states containing 800 million people, all of whom are guaranteed in law the protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms set out in the Convention.