European human rights standards in the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereinafter “the Convention”) are formulated in very general terms and do not establish clear rules of conduct. The European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter “the Court”) cannot apply them by a mere qualification (subsumption) of the facts of a case. For the legal resolution of cases concerning compliance with the Convention’s human rights standards, the Court resorts at least to a complex subsumption as its algorithm for legal decision-making. When the standard’s formulation is such that complex subsumption alone is insufficient for a legal resolution, the Court weighs and balances competing rights or interests. To that end, it employs argumentative algorithms, which it refers to as “tests” These tests typically include criteria and a sequence of steps for evaluating and weighing a particular issue.

Since the study of the peculiarities of such argumentative algorithms – which underpin legal decision-making in the practice of the European Court of Human Rights – has not yet been the subject of comprehensive theoretical analysis in Ukrainian legal doctrine, the aim of this article is to fill that gap.

The research findings indicate that the Court’s argumentative algorithms are developed on a “case-by-case” basis; the main ones being complex subsumption and various weighing tests. The selection of a specific argumentative algorithm for a given case or category of cases depends primarily on the formulation of the Convention’s human rights standard and the complexity of the case.

The article analyses the argumentative algorithms employed by the Court in its case-law.

It has been established that the most sought-after test within the Ukrainian legal system is the proportionality test, which enables the resolution of issues regarding violations of the Convention by establishing the proportionality of the interference with a right for which the Convention text sets out clear legitimate aims (in particular, Articles 8, 9, 10, 11 of the Convention, and Article 1 of the First Protocol to the Convention). The Court utilizes its argumentative algorithms of complex subsumption to determine whether there is a violation of those Convention rights that entail a series of state obligations (notably, Articles 5 and 6 of the Convention).

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