Regional Human Rights Systems

Alongside the global UN treaty system, three regional systems developed their own charters and enforcement bodies, each shaped by its own political history. In Europe, the Council of Europe, founded in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War, drafted the European Convention on Human Rights, signed in Rome in 1950 and entering into force in 1953, with the British lawyer and politician David Maxwell Fyfe playing a central role in its drafting. It was the first international human rights treaty to establish both a binding obligation on states and a mechanism allowing individuals to bring complaints before an international body, a novelty at the time. The Convention today binds the member states of the Council of Europe, a membership that excludes Russia following its expulsion in 2022.