Between national security and human rights: Constitutional courts and transnational norm harmonization in Lithuania and Latvia

Abstract This article examines how the Constitutional Courts of Lithuania and Latvia manage tensions between the security obligations under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the human rights commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights. While both courts recognize state security obligations as legitimate justifications for state-secrets governance, the Lithuanian Court’s earlier development of ECHR-grounded constitutional jurisprudence prior to its NATO accession has produced more rights-protective outcomes than the Latvian Court in the domain of state-secrets governance. However, the Latvian Court afforded a higher level of rights protection following the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in Ternovskis v. Latvia (2014). Building upon the case study, I advance a path-dependent thesis: prior internalization of ECHR norms creates a self-reinforcing framework that structures the function of security obligations in constitutional adjudication, while constitutional courts that lack this prior framework require an external shock to achieve similar results. Furthermore, this article identifies constitutional courts as pivotal sites of transnational norm harmonization: they construct the hierarchical framework through which multiple international obligations are organized within the domestic constitutional system, facilitating national policies and the operation of international organizations whose obligations are so ordered.