THE IMPACT OF THE PRACTISE OF THE ECtHR ON THE HARMONISATION OF NATIONAL PRIVATE LAW: CHALLENGES AND LIMITS

The article examines how the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) influences the harmonization of national private law, highlighting both its integrative potential and its structural limits. In the first part, the author reconstructs the moral and theoretical foundations of human rights as a prerequisite for the legitimacy of modern legal orders, emphasizing that human rights function as a minimum standard of justice that cannot be reduced to positive law and become most visible precisely through their violation. The article then analyses the ECtHR’s doctrine of “autonomous concepts” under the European Convention on Human Rights and shows how the Court’s independent interpretation of categories such as “home”, “family” and “property” creates tensions with national legal definitions, restricts states’ margin of appreciation and generates issues of legal certainty, sovereignty and alleged “double standards”. Particular attention is paid to the impact of ECtHR practice on Ukrainian private law: the horizontal effect of the Convention in family and civil disputes, the reconfiguration of concepts like “family”, “best interests of the child” and “property”, and the obligation of Ukrainian courts to apply ECtHR precedents as a source of law, which leads to revisions of domestic case law, evidentiary approaches and the balance of interests between parties. At the same time, the author points out that the reception of ECtHR standards in Ukraine is often formal and incomplete, as systemic problems in complying with Convention requirements persist despite the widespread citation of Strasbourg case law. The article concludes that ECtHR jurisprudence is a powerful driver of harmonisation and humanisation of national private law across Europe, contributing to the emergence of a common legal culture, but due to differing legal traditions, subsidiarity and limited enforcement powers it results in significant harmonisation rather than full unification, turning the relationship between autonomous Strasbourg concepts and national systems into a continuous field of negotiation and methodological challenge.