Posted by ccld201
12 November 2025Professor Susanne Baer, a former judge of the German Constitutional Court, once stated that one of the goals of judicial review is to fulfil the promise of human dignity as equal respect. What Professor Baer stated is certainly applicable also to the institutions that protect human rights beyond the state, including the European Court of Human Rights.
Although human dignity does not feature in the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, it is hard to deny that the Convention itself heeded the clarion call of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other post-World War II legal texts to respect and protect human dignity. The list of rights included in the Convention distils a rich variety of ways in which human dignity needs protection.
What is paradoxical about the protection of human dignity is its simultaneous universality and variability. On the one hand, the Universal Declaration cemented the idea that all human beings deserve to be treated with equal respect. On the other hand, dignity does not always have the same meaning. According to Paolo Carozza, it is essentially a context-based, culturally loaded notion, which often varies with time and place.
Its simultaneous global reach and variability have made dignity a contested notion, especially in jurisdictions that cover large territories and a wide range of political and legal cultures such as the Council of Europe. If the countries that are party to the Convention may equally and genuinely care about the freedoms enlisted in the document, they may still hold significantly different views of what dignity means in a certain circumstance. For example, in some countries, such as Canada — or even in some subnational entities — dignity may be understood as requiring the protection of a certain right, such as freedom of speech, while in others dignity requires the mitigation of the same right, such as for the sake of protecting the reputation of other individuals, groups, or entities.
This variability is particularly difficult to handle for the European Court of Human Rights. The Court operates according to the subsidiarity principle, by intervening and hopefully redressing cases of injustice that have not been solved at the domestic level: if called on to adjudicate a case that revolves around dignity, it needs to gauge what dignity entails in a certain context from which it is more detached than domestic courts. But once the Court has delivered its judgement on a particular case, its ruling is likely to radiate well beyond the controversy from which it originated, as more parties will use it to make their claims in other domestic courts and later in the Court of Strasbourg again.
Dignity has become even more controversial with the increasing ideological and cultural polarisation within each society. Within a polity, different people may have profoundly different views of what dignity means and entails under a certain circumstance. The current polarisation that so many Western countries are experiencing is distancing individuals and groups, making each faction impermeable to dissonant ideas and challenging opinions. Information bubbles may develop profoundly different views about dignity and what it entails. As Christopher McCrudden pointed out some years ago, judicial fora home and abroad can easily become tools through which each faction tries to advance its agenda—which may range from bioethics to family law, from religious freedom to environmental and digital transitions—without testing it first with other discordant opinions. Polarised views on dignity are thus likely to bring much of their animosity in courts. Beyond the state, tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights may find it particularly hard to adjudicate dignity-based disputes that are so divisive in the countries in which they originated and about which citizens and factions are extremely reluctant to compromise.
Especially in polarised societies, the problem of adjudicating about dignity is exacerbated by the increasing recourse to identity-based narratives, which have been investigated by political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama. Claims about dignity are often proxies through which individuals or groups assert their need that the broader society accepts them as full members of the polity and publicly acknowledges that something is quintessential to their life and self-understanding. Lawsuits about dignity thus vehicle highly political and symbolic needs of recognition. Such needs run the risk of spiralling into subjectivist claims through which people seek protection for their sensitivity and legitimation for their own ideology.
In general, dignity has become a powerful tool for groups and individuals seeking social recognition and protection through the judicial process also in the European Court of Human Rights, as Eugenia Relaño Pastor has argued. However, the expectations that courts may provide social recognition probably overestimate the role of the judiciary. Borrowing from Professor András Sajó –a former judge of the European Court of Human Rights – courts cannot be expected to provide groups and individuals with social recognition. Actually, in deeply divided societies, a victory in court is likely to boost the morale of those who won, as it is likely to anger those who lost. Instead of placating heated arguments, it is prone to exacerbate them.
The place of dignity in litigation is therefore at a crossroads. It is a powerful booster as well as an irritant. It is probably time to reflect on the proper role of dignity and on how institutions can protect it. Rather than being a hermeneutical tool that parties and judges can stretch to cover and invigorate their own claims, dignity can both serve as a reminder that judicial procedures are mechanisms through which individuals and groups dialogue, confront each other, and defuse conflicts. Instead of weaponising institutions for the sake of human dignity, dignity can urge everyone to treat legal institutions seriously, as Jeremy Waldron has emphasised. Especially if these cover a great deal of peoples, cultures, and worldviews.
Debates about dignity can help illuminate the meaning of dignity. Discovering what it is requires a collaborative effort that accepts that different opinions may coexist, rather than a battlefield in which factions antagonise each other. Courts in which parties appear as adversaries can hardly do the job of reconciling divergent ways of understanding the concept. The Strasbourg Court may help to understand dignity; it will hardly persuade deeply divided societies that are leveraging it to accept one view of dignity over another.
Andrea Pin is Full Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Padova (Italy). A former clerk at the Italian Constitutional Court, his articles have appeared in American, British, French, German, Israeli, Italian, and Spanish academic journals. He is Senior Fellow and McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Center for the study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Among his most recent books are Religious Freedom Without the Rule of Law. The Constitutional Odysseys of Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq and the Fate of the Middle East (Brill 2024); Dignity in Judgment. Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press 2025); The Legal Foundations of Religious Freedom: Human Rights in the United States and Europe (with John Witte, Jr., forthcoming with Notre Dame Press). He has held visiting positions at the universities of Emory, Notre Dame, and William and Mary (United States); Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland); Bar Ilan and Reichman (Israel); Lomonosov, Moscow (Russia).