This is a difficult book. On the face of it, the subject-matter is not so intractable, though it is certainly extensive, that it ought to present formidable obstacles of organisation and explanation – but it does in this instance. Partly this lies with the author's ambition to reduce the case-law of the European Convention institutions to a coherent pattern. This is hard enough to do even for its jurisprudence on the substantive provisions of the Convention, let alone for the disparate examples where matters of international law have bothered the Court and Commission (Dr Forowicz treats as thoroughly Commission practice as she does that of the Court: to keep things short, I shall say “Court” to cover either and both). Partly it rests with the framework she relies on to analyse the cases – the “fragmentation of international law” (pp. 18–20 and throughout the Conclusion) (on which, see below). Partly it is because of relentless repetition of ideas and information, no doubt hardly modified from the PhD on which the book is based. And partly it is down to some awkwardness of English style (with which she does not appear to have had much effective help from her editor). It is a long text and readers need more help than they are given if they are to make it to the end with their eyes still on the theoretical balls which are used to try to render the practice comprehensible.

Although Dr Forowicz promises a comprehensive account of the reception of international law by the Strasbourg institutions, she immediately resiles from this undertaking by explaining that she will look at only six discrete subject areas of international law with which the Court has been confronted (pp.v–vi). They are: “Child Rights” (by which she means a number of treaties concerned with some aspects of the treatment of children); “Civil and Political Rights” (by which she refers to elements of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and some practice of the Human Rights Committee); the prohibition of torture etc; “Refugee Rights” (again, confined to some aspects of the Refugee Convention); State Immunity (largely dealing with Al-Adsani and its immediately associated cases); and International Humanitarian Law (IHL), covering many of the situations, arguably or certainly within the ambit of IHL, out of which cases have reached Strasbourg. In addition, she looks at “two other areas of general international law”, the law of treaties (ch.1) and the case-law of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (ch.2). This latter is an odd creature here for its is not an “area” of international law at all but a random collection of cases and opinions, scattered unevenly over the substance of the international legal system. Its presence is, I think, because of one of a number of incommensurabilities which she seems unable definitively to resolve. It would have been one thing (and I should have said quite a good thing) to have put the whole of the Court's practice with respect to international law under scrutiny to see when the Court was driven to deal with international law and what kind of a fist it made of the international law questions when it did decide to take them on. The ICJ section would have been part of such an inquiry, though what would have been interesting would have been what weight the Court gave to ICJ judgments and opinions, rather than the actual substance of any particular one of them, a sources and evidence exercise, I suppose. The Court's judgments contain a section on “THE LAW” and, helpfully a subsection on International Law if any has been pleaded in the case. There is some pretty rum stuff under these heads – treaties to which the defendant State is not a party, General Assembly resolutions, codes of practice and so on.

On questions of interpretation, it is not only the ECHR which confronts the Court but other international agreements – I do not suppose that many international lawyers would find the interpretation of the France-Cambodia note in Medvedyev very convincing. I find it hard to see how one gets on to the bigger questions without assessing how the Court “does” international law. Dr Forowicz's understands this but does not give it much attention. Her aim is more far-reaching – she wants to look at “regimes” of international law because of her “fragmentation” agenda, to see how the Court, the Convention being a “regime”, reacts to other “regimes”. Not all other “regimes” have institutions to implement their rules and, where there are none, any relationship is bound to be asymmetrical. While nobody believes any more (if anyone ever did) in totally autonomous, self-contained regimes, the usual reason for recognising the impossibility of total autonomy has been the need to supplement even the most dense, discrete system or collection of rules by at least some of the provisions of general international law on matters such as interpretation and responsibility. That is why the section in this book on treaties is so central. In the absence of specific rules within any regime, those charged with the application of its rules are required to take into account the rules of general international law, which ordinarily means Articles 31–33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). The practice of different institutions in doing so should, if they do it properly, reinforce the utility of the general rules by imbuing them with certainty and detail. Different, though, are the substantive rules of the regimes. Each institution, where there is one, is directed to its own rules and, where it finds it necessary to look at the determinations of those of other regimes on the same or a similar point, it is, in principle, entitled to reach its own decision, notwithstanding what it finds elsewhere. As has been increasingly recognised, it is desirable for the coherence of the international legal system that institutions adopt an attitude of comity towards the activities of their peers but, in the absence of any notion of hierarchy, there is no normative obligation to do so. Where Dr Forowicz identifies a hierarchical rule, Article 103 of the Charter, she is deeply unimpressed by the use the Court has made of it (pp. 94–101). One can see here (and on other matters like the dispersed treatment of ius cogens, pp. 306–307, p. 390) a hankering after a hierarchy of values, despite her earlier disavowal of a commitment to international constitutionalism (p. 21) (a scepticism which I share).

Dr Forowicz relies on a key concept to explain the interpretative options open to the Court, allowing that the Convention itself does not compel it in one direction or another. She is undoubtedly right that interpretation is the most important element in bringing matters of international law within the competence of the Court, though this is not merely because of a general necessity of having some principles on which to rely to decide what the notoriously open-ended text of the Convention means. There are specific references to international law in the Convention itself (which is one reason why it is a pity that she did not include international criminal law as one of her “regimes”, given the reference to international law in Article 7 and the interesting cases which have arisen with respect to it). Her spectrum of options to the interpretative approach is bookended by the “closed” and “open paradigms”, her fundamental constructs. In the one, the Court would adopt an attitude of restraint and be reluctant to take on matters of the international law; in the other, in would indulge in activism and “unhindered” references to international law. Under the open paradigm, one of the Court's aims would be to reduce fragmentation, by interpreting the Convention in the light of general international law and (and this is the controversial assertion) “to adjust its [the Convention's] provisions to the surrounding regimes”: but why? – why, on what legal basis and why, to what end? Besides, there seems to be an assumption that referring to international law will only cut one way, in favour of an activist interpretation of the rights in the Convention, but there are several examples showing that this is not always the case, notably Al-Adsani. Are not the international law arguments of the minority in Mamatkulov more convincing as an exercise of in international law than those of the majority? Following the State-protective elements in the Refugee Convention would run counter to its own doctrine of non-refoulement which the Court has successfully fashioned after Soering. Most fundamentally of all, the application of the strictest understanding of the rules of treaty interpretation might easily have inhibited the adoption by the Strasbourg institutions of its most powerful techniques for protecting human rights, the principle of effectiveness and the principle of evolving interpretation. Dr Forowicz acknowledges this, indeed treats these matters well but almost without regard to some of her more general propositions. She recognises too that the interpretation of treaties at large appears to be undergoing an evolution. It is not just the European Court which is affected by this, even if it has not articulated terribly clearly what is going on. She is certainly right to point to the potentially significant but, by the Court, hardly explicated reliance on Article 31(3)(c) of the VCLT, one of its several difficulties being how “any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between the parties” is to be understood in cases brought by individuals to a human rights Court.

I have been critical because I think that this is a book which has not achieved its admittedly very demanding objectives and, that not doing so, has obscured the valuable excavation it presents of the Court's practice in the face of matters of international law, an account which is extensive and contains worthwhile critical evaluation of some of the jurisprudence. Even here though, one should be warned that small errors occur throughout – Lawless is said to be about an Article 15 declaration by the United Kingdom (p. 60); Mrs Loizidou is said to have moved from northern Cyprus to the Republic of Cyprus (p. 49); Article 13 appears when Article 33 is intended (p. 79).

“Fragmentation” is the great problem – what it is and what should be done about. I don't think we can talk sensibly about “fragmentation in the ECHR case law” (p. 387) and it is asking a lot of the Court to take on an “anti-fragmentation” burden in addition to all its other obligations. International lawyers have, if I may put it this way, been talking fragmentation all their lives, if not without knowing at least without bothering about it. Now, talking about it may, despite Professor Koskenniemi's best efforts, be doing more harm than good. Comity, for all its uncertainty, seems a better bet than normative regulation.