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alain wijffels but also to legal methods and a growing body of general and specialist legal literature which has carried human rights right into the different branches of the law. In Europe, that literature, which has by now become mainstream legal doctrine, owes itself much to legal practice, not least the practice of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.40 In spite of its high standing from the beginning, it may be argued that at first, the Strasbourg court was still regarded as peripheral. In European legal education, most outlines and diagrams of the national courts’ systems may well have shown that beyond the decisions of the national jurisdiction’s supreme court, there was possibly still a remedy before the Court of Human Rights, but that court was never seen as some kind of supra-national “supreme court” (no more than the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg). It took a few decades before the impact of the court’s decisions in all areas of the national legal systems was fully perceived and acknowledged. Through the combined influence of human rights scholars and activists, and of the case law developed in Strasbourg, human rights have become an issue which affects most public policies. In that way, although social scientists have taken over the role from lawyers as experts on issues of how to ensure that public governance is efficient, and although democratically elected representatives have acquired the exclusive legitimacy to determine what are just and fair public policies, human rights bring the lawyers back upstream into the political decision-making process, because those political decisions need to take into account the impact of those political decisions on human rights. Human rights have become an essential feature of the “justice” of public governance,41 they are the new face of the Justitia-figure featuring in the medieval and early-modern paintings of buon governo or gutes Regiment. In our approach to public governance, human rights have replaced – or, one might also say: they rephrase and update – the former classical and Christian values and virtues which had to foster the right public governance. Their essential role in 40 See (e.g.) several separate articles in: Christoffersen, Jonas – Rask Madsen, Mikael (eds.) 2011 and Alter, Karen 2009. 41 Sano, Hans-Otto – Alfredsson, Gudmundur – Clapp, Robin (eds.) 2002 49

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