Dilek Kurban, “Authoritarian Resistance and Judicial Complicity: Turkey and the European Court of Human Rights.” European Journal of International Law, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2024): 355–387
Summary: International courts face growing contestations to their authority. Scholars have conceptualized the forms and grounds of such resistance as well as the response of international courts. Yet, in focusing on overt resistance, not differentiating between authoritarian and democratic regimes, and depicting courts at the receiving end of resistance, scholarship does not account for discrete forms of resistance tolerated and enabled by courts. Based on an in-depth and contextual analysis of the ECtHR-Turkey case, the article puts forth empirically grounded insights on authoritarian resistance and judicial complicity. It argues that authoritarian regimes seek to lessen international courts’ oversight of their policies, not to undermine the authority of these courts as such, and that international courts are not always resilient vis-à-vis authoritarian resistance but can also be complicit with it. The forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depend on the institutional set-up of the human rights regime in question as well as the ways in which international courts exercise their review powers. The two phenomena influence and reinforce each other, resulting in the simultaneous or consecutive occurrence of various forms of authoritarian resistance and judicial response depending on the particular political context in which they interact.