JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, SEXUAL ORIENTATION: A SOCIO-LEGAL STUDY OF THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The contemporaneity has been famously defined as “the age of rights” (Bobbio 1995), and the logic of rights has become “the principal language that we use in public settings to discuss weighty questions of both right and wrong” (Glendon 1991, 63). If human rights give voice to minorities and marginalized groups in society, and they can do so with powerful legal and symbolical resources, the tendency to frame almost every social conflict in terms of a clash of rights also favours absolute formulations and the activation of judiciary.Under such premises, this dissertation provides a qualitative socio-legal analysis of the jurisprudence on sexual orientation of the European Court of Human Rights. More in detail, I focus on the arguments produced by the judges, and I analyze the legal controversies, the normative framing, the social perspectives, and the moral standpoints that orient the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The aim is twofold; on one hand, I investigate how the aforementioned arguments influence the evaluation, the acceptance, or the refusal of claims grounded on sexual orientation. On the other, the purpose is to critically engage in the asserted neutral character of judicial reasoning, in order to reveal the clash of perspectives underpinned to the interpretation of human rights.