The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe monitors the execution of judgments, particularly to ensure payments awarded by the court appropriately compensate applicants for the damage they have sustained.

[5] The convention has had a significant influence on the law in Council of Europe member countries[6] and is widely considered the most effective international treaty for human rights protection.

The development of a regional system of human rights protections operating across Europe can be seen as a direct response to twin concerns.

[9] Consequently, the convention was principally conceived, at the time of its creation, as an "anti-totalitarian" measure to help stabilise social democracies in Western Europe, rather than as a specific reaction to the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust.

French former minister and French Resistance fighter Pierre-Henri Teitgen submitted a report[13] to the Assembly proposing a list of rights to be protected, selecting a number from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that had recently been agreed to in New York, and defining how the enforcing judicial mechanism might operate.

After extensive debates,[14] the Assembly sent its final proposal[15] to the council's Committee of Ministers, which convened a group of experts to draft the convention itself.

The convention was designed to incorporate a traditional civil liberties approach to securing "effective political democracy", from the strongest traditions in the United Kingdom, France and other member states of the fledgling Council of Europe, as said by Guido Raimondi, President of the European Court of Human Rights: The European system of protection of human rights with its Court would be inconceivable untied from democracy.

In fact, we have a bond that is not only regional or geographic: a State cannot be party to the European Convention on Human Rights if it is not a member of the Council of Europe; it cannot be a member State of the Council of Europe if it does not respect pluralist democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

Statements of principle are, from a juridical point of view, not determinative and require and have given occasion to extensive interpretation by courts to bring out meaning in particular factual situations.

[23] In Evans v United Kingdom, the court ruled that the question of whether the right to life extends to a human embryo fell within a state's margin of appreciation.

Signatory states to the convention can only derogate from the rights contained in Article 2 for deaths which result from lawful acts of war.

The court has emphasised the fundamental nature of Article 3 in holding that the prohibition is made in "absolute terms ... irrespective of the victim's conduct".

[34] In 2014, after new information was uncovered that showed the decision to use the five techniques in Northern Ireland in 1971–1972 had been taken by British ministers,[35] the Irish Government asked the European Court of Human Rights to review its judgement.

In this respect, problems of compliance with Article 6 may arise when national laws allow the use in evidence of the testimonies of absent, anonymous and vulnerable witnesses.

Article 7 incorporates the legal principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (no crime, no penalty without law) into the convention.

Relevant cases are: Article 8 provides a right to respect for one's "private and family life, his home and his correspondence", subject to restrictions that are "in accordance with law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others".

[40] This may be compared to the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, which has also adopted a somewhat broad interpretation of the right to privacy.

Relevant cases are: Article 10 provides the right to freedom of expression, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society".

The court has defended this on the grounds that the article was intended to apply only to different-sex marriage, and that a wide margin of appreciation must be granted to parties in this area.

Additionally, the court ruled in the 2015 case of Oliari and Others v. Italy that states have a positive obligation to ensure there is a specific legal framework for the recognition and protection of same-sex couples.

While the article specifically prohibits discrimination based on "sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinions, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status", the last of these allows the court to extend to Article 14 protection to other grounds not specifically mentioned such as has been done regarding discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation.

Article 15 allows contracting states to derogate from certain rights guaranteed by the convention in a time of "war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation".

For example, Article 5, which guarantees the right to personal freedom, may be explicitly limited in order to bring a suspect before a judge.

To use pre-trial detention as a means of intimidation of a person under a false pretext is, therefore, a limitation of right (to freedom) which does not serve an explicitly provided purpose (to be brought before a judge), and is therefore contrary to Article 18.

[65] Protocol 12 applies the current expansive and indefinite grounds of prohibited discrimination in Article 14 to the exercise of any legal right and to the actions (including the obligations) of public authorities.

Several member states—Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Lithuania, Monaco, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—have not signed the protocol.

They believe that the phrase "rights set forth by law" might include international conventions to which the UK is not a party, and would result in incorporation of these instruments by stealth.

The UK government, nevertheless, stated in 2004 that it "agrees in principle that the ECHR should contain a provision against discrimination that is free-standing and not parasitic on the other Convention rights".

[64] Pending the ratification of Protocol 14 itself, 14bis was devised to allow the court to implement revised procedures in respect of the states which have ratified it.

It also extended the competence of three-judge chambers to declare applications made against those states admissible and to decide on their merits where there already is a well-established case law of the court.