Liberal Rights and Democratic Politics

Abstract This chapter discusses the predicament of systems committed to liberalism and democracy, such as that set up under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which consists in the incompatibility of certain democratic and liberal demands: democratic legitimacy requires that competing individual claims of interests be delineated in a process that treats everyone as an equal source of rights claims, but the very idea behind liberal rights is that they must not depend on the democratic majority. It is hardly possible to resolve this dilemma without the risk of excessive counter-democratic constraints or insufficient liberal-rights protection. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), or whoever else, assumes the role of the ‘constitutional guardian’ inevitably occupies a position at the crossroads of legally protecting established individual rights and of making political choices concerning the delineation of competing claims of rights and interests.