ABSTRACT
The purpose of this contribution is to verify the effectiveness of the right to political participation in such a territorial region as that of the Former Yugoslavia, where the incomplete consolidation of democratic institutions inevitably puts the ECtHR’s legitimacy in doubt. Since the accession to the CoE occurred after the end of a long period of war and authoritarianism, the reception of the Court of Strasbourg’s “democratic arguments” in the States under scrutiny has been of the utmost importance, representing the pivotal incentive for the establishment of political pluralism.
After furnishing the reader with a brief overview of the institutional relationship between the countries’ domestic constitutional order and the regional system of protection of human rights so as to assess the degree of acceptance of the obligations arising from the Convention, the study goes on to detect the ECtHR’s jurisprudence specifically dealing with the enforcement of the characteristic principle of democracy as enshrined in Art. 3 of Protocol 1 (Paunović and Milivojević v. Serbia ruling and the “Sejdic and Finci saga”). Finally, the last section assesses the current status of implementation of the above-mentioned cases, especially investigating on the economic and legal consequences within the domestic legal systems.
