On 9 October the Section President and judge elected in respect of the Czech Republic, Kateřina Šimáčková, spoke at the opening of the 5th Paul Tavernier Study Day, held in Montpellier by the European Human Rights Law Institute.

In her speech on the theme of “France and the ECHR”, the Section President pointed out that France was not only the host country of the Court, a State Party to the Convention, the birthplace of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and of the first modern-day Civil Code, but also the homeland of Simone de Beauvoir, who, in her book The Second Sex, subjected that Civil Code to a feminist critique.

Noting that she was President of the Section dealing with applications against France, she referred to several recent judgments in the area of women’s rights, emphasising that each of them had contributed to the development of the French legal framework for the benefit of society as a whole.

She concluded her speech by emphasising that the dialogue between the Court’s case-law and legal scholarship was beneficial: “On the one hand, legal scholarship has the role of disseminating and promoting the Convention case-law, of fostering the development of Convention standards and, at the same time, of criticising it, thereby encouraging greater coherence and, ultimately, contributing to better justice”.