A small but growing number of studies investigate how some interest groups use legal opportunities in Europe and how this tactic is closed to other advocacy tactics. Compared to their American counterparts, however, there is no systematic comparative work made on European conservative private litigation groups. This is the reason why the main purpose of the paper is to analyse the growing litigation undertaken by such conservative NGOs before the European Court of Human Rights.
In this regard, the paper assumes a partial cognitive, moral and procedural influence on the European human rights justice by conservative Christian private interest groups that fight against liberal movements and their focus on individual freedom, minorities rights and open society. Conservative Christian pressure groups and evangelists promote the protection of (sacred) life, traditional heterosexual family, counter-terrorism policies (against 'foreign terrorists' and the revocation of their citizenship) and the freedom of conscience against the statutory duty of vaccination in pandemic times. In orienting their efforts to enhance such traditional values in their litigation efforts, conservative movements ally with so called 'populist and right-wing governments' (in particular Hungary, Poland and Russia).
In particular, our aim is to demonstrate how Christian conservative interest groups try to shape the orientation of the European human rights case law (in lodging complaints and making third party interventions on a regular basis), to make the execution of the European judgments compliant with their own values and to politicise them. Our article applies a legal and socio-legal methodology (interviews with conservative representatives and lawyers, ECtHR judicial archives) to determine such an influence and forges the concept of 'moral entrepreneur of conservative litigation' to reflect such a process. We show that conservative private interest groups frame the European human rights justice to such a scale that they should be subjected to public regulation.