ABSTRACT

The British press, with a few exceptions, has shown itself to be very hostile to the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and, by extension, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This chapter asks whether Britain is an outlier in this regard by examining newspaper coverage in other signatory states. Although EU scepticism also exists in other European nations, it is less clear to what extent ECHR scepticism is present and how European media perceive the UK’s stance. It is also unknown how comparable European and British media frames are. Previous research involving media representations of Europe has found that news media typically pay limited attention to the EU itself (‘horizontal Europeanization’) as well as to the political discourse in other member states (‘vertical Europeanization’). Focusing on newspaper coverage of the 2012 Brighton Conference at which the UK, as Chair of the Committee of Ministers at the European Council, tried to implement a number of reforms, this study similarly found that there was only limited coverage in the European press of the vertical (the ECHR) and horizontal (Britain’s stance) aspects of this event. Moreover, the limited coverage available suggests that dissatisfaction with the ECHR was very much seen as a domestic British problem. While the British attempt to reform the European Court was portrayed as a failure, the coverage reveals some support for the British reform agenda, for example, in the Dutch and French press. Overall, there was, with a few exceptions, a notable absence of a strong defence of the ECHR against British rights scepticism.