Cutting through the noise: the legitimacy of the European convention on human rights in the British press

This article presents the first systematic analysis of British press coverage regarding the legitimacy of the European Convention on Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights over 25 years (1997–2022). It finds that coverage undermining legitimacy falls into three main areas: limiting or eroding national sovereignty, inadequate performance or effectiveness and disrupting the ‘natural order’. Coverage supporting or defending legitimacy is about providing a safety net, maintaining the international human rights system, and protecting freedoms and liberties. These are distributed unevenly across the six newspapers included in the sample. Critical coverage maps closely to legal scholarship on challenges for legitimacy associated with the identity of the United Kingdom as a political constitutionalist state. Supportive coverage, however, does not fully reflect the broad range of arguments in favour of the legitimacy of the European Convention on Human Rights as identified by human rights campaigners; it is also less abundant, narrower and more tactically defensive.