"Human Dignity as Legal Instrument" The Coherence of the concept of human dignity in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

In this thesis I will examine if the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ‘the Court’) has a coherent concept of human dignity. I will do this by exploring the jurisprudence of the Court, and comparing different judgments on different articles of the European Convention of Human Rights (hereafter ‘the Convention’). As human dignity is generally considered to be the foundation of human rights, it is important to know if the Court uses it as a coherent legal instrument. I will find that human dignity can hardly be a coherent component of law, and that the European Court of Human Rights does not have a perfectly coherent concept of human dignity. However, this thesis shows that this does not mean that there is no coherence at all, or that human dignity cannot be a very useful instrument of law.