ABSTRACT
The Conclusion includes a summation of the way that the European Court of Human Rights uses argumentative tools, their meaning and their functions. It indicates that the European Court of Human Rights avoids taking a definitive stance on moral issues, yet employs legal and non-legal reasoning that stems from a universally rooted social sensibility to substantiate its rulings. The European Court of Human Rights refers to arguments of an extra-legal or mixed nature because its aims – to convince the audience of the rightness of its decisions and to present ethical assessments and related social attitudes – are difficult to express in the language of law. The tasks of the European Court of Human Rights – to rationalise and strive to encapsulate within the structure of judicial reasoning the morally sensitive issues of the beginning and ending of human life – are designed differently than in the case of national courts due to the specific and complex nature of its target audience and particular challenges to its legitimacy. The Conclusion explains the reasons that prompted the European Court of Human Rights to choose the respective argumentative tools and the outcome of its choices in terms of achieving the desired justification, which tend to create a pragmatic, consensual and foreseeable fabric of human rights case law.
