Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights : an old-new tool for defending democratic standards

The paper demonstrates the evolution on the ECtHR’s jurisprudence concerning Art. 18 ECHR in the light of its recent developments. As it is argued, the interpretation of Art. 18 had three principal historical stages: the first one, when this provision was viewed as competing with limitation clauses and only potentially violable; the second, when after the judgment in Gusinskyi the Court admitted its practical applicability; the third, opened up by the recent case Merabishvili v. Georgia. It is only with this last stage that the Court’s jurisprudence gained sufficient coherence and made Art. 18 an effective tool of opposing abuse of limitations by states. The paper argues that Art. 18 should gain particular importance in times of erosion of liberal democracy in Eastern countries of the Council of Europe.