| Summary: | <p>How should the European Court of Human Rights “decide what cases to decide”? This thesis examines the procedural justice of the admissibility decision-making of the Strasbourg court. Reappraising the “individual vs constitutional” debate which continues to dominate the Convention literature, this thesis draws on socio-legal administrative justice theory to analyse the complexities, discrepancies and tensions which have characterised debates about how Strasbourg’s docket-filtering should be organised. Having established the relevance and force of this new conceptual framework, this thesis identifies four distinct and competitive conceptions of how the Court’s docket-filtering should be designed: the Strasbourg as court, constitutional court, bureaucracy and tribunal models. I show that the ongoing debates about admissibility reform and institutional design in both the Council of Europe and the academy have been premised on neither a rigorous empirical analysis of the Court’s working practices, nor a detailed analysis of its admissibility jurisprudence. </p>
<p>This thesis addresses these lacunae. Drawing on an empirical analysis of the evolving text of the Convention, Council of Europe policy papers, evidence of the Court’s working practices, and a critical examination of its published admissibility decisions, this thesis demonstrates that the orthodox, doctrinal analysis of the Court’s admissibility decision-making misunderstands and misrepresents most of the Court’s working practices. The dominant voice in the literature contends that Strasbourg has now become a “constitutional court.” My data shows that while judges retain a superficial responsibility for decision-making at the threshold in Strasbourg, in practice, the Court’s Registry has quietly accrued greater and greater responsibility for the docket while judicial participation in decision-making has been marginalised. The law on the books, it is shown, remains a poor guide to how the law operates in practice. These socio-legal insights allow a radical reappraisal of our understanding of the Court, and the theoretical and methodological limits of the existing literature on the Court and the law of the Convention. </p>
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