The European Court of Human Rights: an unlikely forum for the enforcement of IP Rights

The constitutional limitations of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) constrain the role of the Court in defining the scope of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and their enforcement. This chapter analyses these limitations by explaining the contested origins of the right to property and the paradoxical conferral of property rights to ‘legal persons’; setting out the constitutional constraints on the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction; and reviewing the Court’s case law on IP rights. These considerations explain the very low volume of IPR applications and why the Court is an unlikely forum for the enforcement of IPRs.