The European Court of Human Rights has long held unparalleled sway over questions of human rights violations across continental Europe, Britain, and beyond.  Both supporters and detractors of the Court have accepted the common view that the European human rights system was originally devised as a means of containing communism and fascism after World War II.

In The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, Marco Duranti reinterprets the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that it was also a vehicle for a domestic political agenda.  The U.S. Supreme Court had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal; a European Court of Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically-elected governments to implement left-wing policies that British and French conservatives believed violated their basic liberties.  Duranti revisits the ethical foundations of European integration across the first half of the 20th Century, offers a new perspective on the crisis in which the European Union finds itself today, and sheds new light on Winston Churchill’s involvement in the origins of the European human rights system and his vision of a freer, more united Europe.

Marco Duranti is Lecturer in Modern European and International History at the University of Sydney, where he directs the Nation Empire Globe Research Cluster.  He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the European University Institute, a Fox Fellow at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Research Group on History and Memory at the University of Konstanz.