Reto Walther

Zurich University of Applied Sciences | ZHAW

This doctoral thesis is about the principle of subsidiarity in the European Convention on Human Rights system. Although scholars have published a vast literature on the subsidiarity principle, among many other things, there are hardly any monographs on subsidiarity per se. This study does not represent yet another attempt to conceptualise the margi...

This piece discusses the democratic legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights' judicial law-making.

Dans l’esprit de la citation de Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, le «moment constitutionnel » de 1999 marque à la fois continuité et césure. Cinq thèmes – droits fondamentaux, justice, initiatives populaires, gouvernement fédéral et politique étrangère – qui façonnent l’ordre constitutionnel national peuvent être identifiés. Si la révision constitution...

Recently, Switzerland’s system of justice has made plenty of negative headlines owing to its Federal Attorney’s failures and misconducts, its Federal Criminal Court’s internal grievances, the Federal Supreme Court’s deficient work as supervisory authority of the former, and the Federal Supreme Court’s president’s sexist verbal abuse made in the sam...

While it is evident that the ECtHR’s main task is applying the ECHR, it is debatable whether the Court has adequate regard to general international law when considering questions left open by the ECHR. We contribute to this debate from a normative perspective. We discuss the criticism that the Court unduly evades the ARSIWA by applying an expansive...

In this EJIL Talk! blog post, I argue that including an additional admissibility criterion in the European Convention on Human Rights for cases that were carefully dealt with at the domestic level is worthy of serious consideration, if it corresponds to a desirable understanding of the European Court of Human Rights’ subsidiarity vis-à-vis the Stat...

This article traces the diffusion of constitutional resistance against the ECHR that the German Federal Constitutional Court initiated with its Görgülü-judgment. Based on a comparative overview of the most significant instances of Görgülü-inspired resistance, we make three important points. First, pertaining to the study of legal borrowing, we demo...

This article traces the diffusion of constitutional resistance against the ECHR that the German Federal Constitutional Court initiated with its Görgülü-judgment. Based on a comparative overview of the most significant instances of Görgülü-inspired resistance, we make three important points. First, pertaining to the study of legal borrowing, we demo...

This chapter provides an overview of the resistance to the ECtHR as it has appeared in Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court, academia, and politics. It shows that, although harsh criticism has been expressed by judges, academics, and politicians, neither the executive, legislative, or judicial branch nor scholarship has taken a principally adverse a...

The paper answers the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ call for effective state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms. To begin, it is explored why people whose human rights have been harmed due to extraterritorial business operations are often denied effective judicial remedy. In light of this, the paper scrutinizes the requir...