The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly known as the European Convention on Human Rights or ECHR) is a supranational international treaty designed to protect human rights and political freedoms throughout Europe. It was opened for signature on 4 November 1950 by the member states of the newly formed Council of Europe and entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe member states are parties to the Convention, and any new member is required to ratify it at the earliest opportunity.
The ECHR was directly inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Its main difference lies in the existence of an international court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), whose judgments are legally binding on states parties. This ensures that the rights set out in the Convention are not just principles but are concretely enforceable through individual complaint or inter-state complaint procedures.
To guarantee this judicial enforcement, the Convention established both the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe and the ECtHR, which has sat in Strasbourg since its creation in 1959. Any person who believes their rights under the Convention have been violated by a state party can bring a case before the Court, provided their state allows it under Article 56 of the Convention. Judgments finding violations are binding on the states concerned, which are obliged to comply, particularly by paying appropriate compensation to applicants for any damage suffered. The Committee of Ministers supervises the execution of judgments.
The ECHR has defined the Convention as a living instrument, meaning it must be interpreted in light of present-day conditions. This evolving case law can restrict the margin of appreciation left to states or create new rights derived from existing provisions.
Since its adoption, the Convention has been amended by seventeen additional protocols, which have added new rights or extended existing ones. These include the right to property, the right to education, the right to free elections, the prohibition of imprisonment for debt, the right to freedom of movement, the ban on expelling nationals, the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens, the abolition of the death penalty, procedural safeguards for the expulsion of lawfully residing foreigners, the right to a double degree of jurisdiction in criminal matters, the right to compensation for wrongful conviction, the ne bis in idem principle (not to be tried or punished twice for the same offence), equality between spouses, and a general prohibition of discrimination.
The most recent version entered into force on 1 August 2021 through Protocol No. 15, which added the principle of subsidiarity to the preamble. This principle reaffirms that states parties have the primary responsibility to secure and remedy human rights violations at national level.
The European Convention on Human Rights is widely considered the most effective international treaty for the protection of human rights and has had a significant influence on the domestic law of all Council of Europe member states.
Context
The European Convention on Human Rights has played an important role in the development and awareness of human rights in Europe. The development of a regional system of human rights protections operating across Europe can be seen as a direct response to twin concerns. First, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the convention, drawing on the inspiration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can be seen as part of a wider response from the Allied powers in delivering a human rights agenda to prevent the most serious human rights violations which had occurred during the Second World War from happening again.
Second, the convention was a response to the growth of Stalinism in Central and Eastern Europe and was designed to protect the member states of the Council of Europe from communist subversion. This, in part, explains the constant references to values and principles that are "necessary in a democratic society" throughout the convention, despite the fact that such principles are not in any way defined within the convention itself. Consequently, the convention was principally conceived, at the time of its creation, as an "anti-totalitarian" measure to help stabilise social democracies in Western Europe, rather than as a specific reaction to the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust. This approach was a continuation of Atlanticist beliefs from World War II and the early Cold War which called for the defence of democracy against all forms of authoritarianism.
History
From 7 to 10 May 1948, politicians including Winston Churchill, François Mitterrand, and Konrad Adenauer, as well as civil society representatives, academics, business leaders, trade unionists, and religious leaders convened the Congress of Europe in The Hague. At the end of the Congress, a declaration and following pledge to create the convention was issued. The second and third articles of the pledge state: "We desire a Charter of Human Rights guaranteeing liberty of thought, assembly and expression as well as right to form a political opposition. We desire a Court of Justice with adequate sanctions for the implementation of this Charter."
The convention was drafted as one the first and most important tasks of the newly-formed Council of Europe. Over 100 parliamentarians from the then-twelve member states of the Council gathered in Strasbourg in the summer of 1949 for the first-ever meeting of the Council's Consultative Assembly to draft the "charter of human rights" announced at the Hague, and to establish a court to enforce it. British MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the chair of the Assembly's Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, was one of its leading members and guided the drafting of the convention, based on an earlier draft produced by the European Movement. As a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, he had seen first-hand the power of international justice.
French former minister and French Resistance fighter Pierre-Henri Teitgen submitted a report to the Assembly proposing a list of rights to be protected, selecting a number from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that had recently been agreed to in New York, and defining how the enforcing judicial mechanism might operate. After extensive debates, the Assembly sent its final proposal to the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers, which convened a group of experts to draft the convention itself.
The convention was designed to incorporate a traditional civil liberties approach to securing "effective political democracy", from the strongest traditions in the United Kingdom, France and other member states of the fledgling Council of Europe, as said by Guido Raimondi, President of the European Court of Human Rights:
The European system of protection of human rights with its Court would be inconceivable untied from democracy. In fact, we have a bond that is not only regional or geographic: a State cannot be party to the European Convention on Human Rights if it is not a member of the Council of Europe; it cannot be a member State of the Council of Europe if it does not respect pluralist democracy, the rule of law and human rights. So a non-democratic State could not participate in the ECHR system: the protection of democracy goes hand in hand with the protection of rights.
— Guido Raimondi
The convention was opened for signature on 4 November 1950 in Rome. It was ratified and entered into force on 3 September 1953. It is overseen and enforced by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the Council of Europe. Until procedural reforms in the late 1990s, the convention was also overseen by a European Commission on Human Rights.
Proposals for reform of the convention have been put forward, for example by former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and other UK politicians. Conservative politicians have proposed reform or withdrawal from the convention during the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election. After the September 2025 British cabinet reshuffle Labour Party officials said other member countries wanted Britain to play a leading role in reforming the convention, while opposition party Reform UK pledged to leave the ECHR to have free hand in deporting migrants. It has been argued by many academics and most recently the then-Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, that rather than the Convention being the issue, it is rather the way in which the UK interprets the Convention domestically which tends to be more strict than most other State Parties.
Membership
As of 2025, all 46 member states of the Council of Europe are High Contracting Parties to the Convention. Article 59 of the Convention states that it is open for signature by member states of the Council of Europe, and ratification of the Convention is a prerequisite for any state wishing to join the Council. Therefore, the membership of the two bodies is identical.
The Convention and its protocols are not open to states outside the Council of Europe. However, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe may invite a non-member state to accede, though this power has not been used.
Russia was a party to the Convention from 1998 until 2022. Although it joined the Council of Europe in 1996, it ratified the Convention on 5 May 1998. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe suspended Russia's rights of representation on 25 February 2022.
On 16 March 2022, Russia was formally excluded from the Council of Europe. As a legal consequence of its expulsion, Russia ceased to be a High Contracting Party to the Convention on 16 September 2022, after a six-month transitional period. The European Court of Human Rights remains competent to handle applications against Russia concerning violations that occurred before this date.
Accession by the European Union
An ongoing membership consideration is the accession of the European Union (EU) itself to the Convention. The EU is an international organisation, not a state, and its member states are already parties to the Convention, as membership of the CoE is a prerequisite of membership of the EU.
The Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force in 2009, made it a legal obligation for the EU to accede to the ECHR. Accession would subject the EU's institutions, including the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), to the external human rights monitoring of the European Court of Human Rights. A draft accession agreement was finalised in 2013.
In 2019, the European Commission announced the EU's readiness to resume negotiations on accession to the ECHR. In 2020, the Council of Europe tasked the Steering Committee for Human Rights (CDDH), within the 46+1 negotiation group, with finalising the legal instruments governing accession. Between 2020 and 2023, the group held multiple meetings and concluded negotiations on all issues except one concerning the CJEU's jurisdiction over alleged fundamental rights violations linked to the EU's common foreign and security policy. The EU undertook to resolve this matter internally and to keep the CDDH informed of developments.
On 17 March 2023, the Draft agreement on the accession of the European Union to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms was adopted. This draft agreement would allow the European Union to take part in the defence of respondent States before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) through a co-respondent mechanism. Likewise, the European Union would accede to the Convention as well as to its Additional Protocol No. 1 and No. 6, but not to No. 13, concerning the total abolition of the death penalty, even though it has already been ratified by all its Member States. As this is an amending protocol, all States Parties to the Convention will have to ratify it for it to enter into force. The finalization of the process has since hinged on resolving the remaining legal complexities surrounding the CFSP and the formal ratification requirements.
This draft requires the referral of the matter to the CJEU and the obtaining of a favourable opinion before the signature procedure can begin. This referral ultimately took place on 26 January 2026. The time between this referral and the delivery of the opinion is estimated at between 18 and 24 months.
Drafting
The convention is drafted in broad terms, in a similar (albeit more modern) manner to the 1689 Scottish Claim of Right Act 1689, to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, the 1791 U.S. Bill of Rights, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, or the first part of the German Basic Law. Statements of principle are, from a juridical point of view, not determinative and require and have given occasion to extensive interpretation by courts to bring out meaning in particular factual situations.
Convention articles
As amended by Protocol 11, the convention consists of three parts. The main rights and freedoms are contained in Section I, which consists of Articles 2 to 18. Section II (Articles 19 to 51) sets up the court and its rules of operation. Section III contains various concluding provisions.
Before the entry into force of Protocol 11, Section II (Article 19) set up the commission and the court, Sections III (Articles 20 to 37) and IV (Articles 38 to 59) included the high-level machinery for the operation of, respectively, the commission and the court, and Section V contained various concluding provisions.
Many of the articles in Section I are structured in two paragraphs: the first sets out a basic right or freedom (such as Article 2(1) – the right to life) but the second contains exclusions, exceptions or limitations on the basic right (such as Article 2(2) – which excepts certain uses of force leading to death).
Article 1 – respecting rights
Article 1 simply binds the signatory parties to secure the rights under the other articles of the convention "within their jurisdiction". In exceptional cases, "jurisdiction" may not be confined to a contracting state's own national territory; the obligation to secure convention rights then also extends to foreign territories, such as occupied land in which the state exercises effective control.
In Loizidou v Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that jurisdiction of member states to the convention extended to areas under that state's effective control as a result of military action.