ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the essential legal dimension of the rights and responsibilities under European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), while remaining mindful of the other important dimensions to human rights—namely, the moral, cultural, social, political, economic and gendered dimensions—with which the legal dimension necessarily interrelates. It distinguishes between court-enforced human rights and the scope for the implementation of rights outside the courts. The burden of the combined impact of the privatisation of human rights under the ECHR and the expansion of state responsibility that goes with it, will fall upon the legislatures, executives and bureaucracies of states more that the courts. For it is they, and not the courts, that can and must search out and repair the structural and substantive defects in laws and legal systems that might allow infringements of human rights to occur whether as a consequence of actions of public officials or the state itself, or private individuals.
