[4] In Tyrer the court rejected the argument that because people in the Isle of Man approved of judicial corporal punishment, such could not be a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
[8] The judgement for Demir and Baykara v. Turkey (2008) stated that the living instrument doctrine, in addition to being in light of present-day conditions, also meant interpretation "in accordance with developments in international law, so as to reflect the increasingly high standard being required in the area of the protection of human rights".
[10] In the early 2000s, the Court loosened its reliance on European consensus and began to consider a trend in member states' laws sufficient to find that present-day conditions had changed with regard to a particular issue according to the living instrument doctrine.
[15] Because of the living instrument doctrine, the Court has ruled on the human rights implications of technologies that did not exist when the Convention was drafted, on issues such as biotechnology, internet freedom, personal data, mass surveillance, and surrogacy.
Accordingly, the Court should not give any more weight to majoritarian preferences across the entire Council of Europe area than within a particular state, and is justified in raising the threshold of human rights protection, despite the blowback it has received from certain rulings.