ABSTRACT
The Convention is a post-war declaration akin to the slightly older United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both documents were motivated in turn by a fervent wish to avoid any repetition of the human rights abuses witnessed during the Nazi occupation of Europe. The prediction that a regional international court could be effective in Europe has been borne out, and the cases contesting the criminalization of homosexual acts number among the more dramatic illustrations of this thesis. From the perspective of political ideals informed by the philosophy of Enlightenment liberalism, the European Court's intervention in Irish judicial review, the decisions in Dudgeon and Norris are to be applauded. European privacy law is, unfortunately, almost as big a mess as the corresponding mess the US courts have produced over an unenumerated right of the privacy during the past three decades.
