Incompatible or impossible—legal conflict resolution at the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract The article mediates between doctrinal and analytical scholarship by framing conflict between duties enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights using the impossibility-of-joint-compliance test, and examining how the resulting account diverges from human rights literature. Analysis of conflict management at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been hampered, in part, by a conflation of legal conflict and logical contradiction. Court precedent is used as support for a revised stance, highlighting the specificity, plurality and contingency of conflict resolution rules. This stance leads to a more charitable interpretation of case law, a rejection of absolute rights as an explanatory mechanism, and a rebuttal to calls for the ECtHR to adopt an explicit moral framework for conflict resolution.