Konrad Lachmayer wrote together with Susanne Gstöttner an article about “The Austrian Constitutional Court. A human rights stronghold despite increasing judicial restraint” in Kálmán Pócza (ed), “Constitutional Review in Western Europe” at Routledge.
This chapter takes a closer look at the strength of the ACC’s decisions from 1990 to 2020 based on empirical data collected in the JUDICON-EU project. Coming from the 1980s, the Court could be characterized as a highly activist court, based particularly on an increasing and expanding human rights and rule of law case law. However, the collected data indicates that the ACC has entered a new phase in recent years. A qualitative analysis shows that the ACC can, nevertheless, be considered a strong constitutional court, since it is still ready and willing to interfere in politics when rights and rule of law are at stake. Therefore, while it now exerts more judicial restraint overall, it does still occasionally take an activist approach – often in cases of great legal and political relevance.
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