Raised Above The People

Strasbourg’s living instrument, foreign criminals, and the neutralization of democratic sovereignty.

Lars Møller | September 10, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: The Duke of Lorraine and escort return to the Rhine in front of Strasbourg (Johann Tobias Sonntag, 1744) 

The European Court of Human Rights has become a singularly arrogant institution of anti-democratic governance in contemporary Europe. Its administration of the Convention has severed the link between popular consent and the fundamental decisions that shape national life—border control, the removal of foreign offenders, and the preservation of social order.

What was originally presented by the Council of Europe as a limited safeguard against totalitarian excess has evolved into a judicial machinery that, as a matter of course, privileges the claims of non-citizens and criminals over the security and continuity of the native majority. The consequence is a creeping transfer of sovereign power from elected parliaments to an unelected international tribunal whose rulings accelerate demographic and cultural transformation while insulating itself from electoral correction. 

At the heart of the British constitutional tradition lies the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Law emerges from the contest of representatives who must periodically submit themselves to the judgement of the electorate. The English historian David Starkey has repeatedly insisted that this arrangement constitutes the essential character of English liberty: the capacity of the political nation to revise its own rules when circumstances demand it. The incorporation of the European Convention through the Human Rights Act 1998 inverted that hierarchy. Final interpretive authority passed to distant Strasbourg judges who owe no accountability to British voters.

When those judges determine that a democratically enacted deportation policy or sentencing regime conflicts with an evolving reading of the Convention, the will of the elected legislature is frozen. Recourse exists only through the slow, uncertain path of treaty amendment or withdrawal—options that successive governments have treated as politically toxic. The practical consequence is that the electorate may change governments yet find the decisive instruments of policy still constrained by a non-parliamentary, yet sovereign body that it never elected and cannot dismiss.

The inappropriate displacement of democratic authority is compounded by........

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