Since the Second World War, and especially over the past twenty years, the evolution of the transnational human rights regime centred on the Convention has been one of the most remarkable institutional transformations in Europe. It embodies a highly successful transnational legal system with far-reaching consequences for European and national governance. In its genesis, the Convention regime was the creature of state governments, which also determined with their decision-making its institutional remoulding over time. At the same time, though, its evolution into a ‘constitutional instrument of European public order’ has been a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Its construction and operation has involved dynamic processes of interaction engaging various national authorities but also non-state social actors, both individual and collective.

The present volume has sought to identify and explore the factors and conditions that determine the implementation and domestic impact of the ECtHR's judgments, and the variable patterns of influence that they exert upon national laws and policies. While national authorities promptly institute measures and pursue reforms called for by the ECtHR's judgments in some cases, they procrastinate or resist doing so in others. But variation is also qualitative, as the adopted measures in response to some judgments may be directly appropriate to the underlying rights issue or dispute at stake, or conversely, they may be extraneous or only tangentially related to it. By contextualising implementation in its domestic institutional and societal context, the contributions shed light on the multi-faceted ways in which the ECHR system and its Strasbourg-based judicial arm penetrate and impact upon national legal and political orders.