Dismantling the iron-cage: the discursive persistence and legal failure of a “Bureaucratic Rational” construction of the admissibility decision-making of the European Court of Human Rights

Over the last decade, the admissibility decision-making of the European Court of Human Rights has been the focus of considerable attention in the analysis of the “mounting pressure on the Convention system,” but has enjoyed little critical analysis in legal, sociological or socio-legal literatures. This paper will argue that this combination of intense attention and critical neglect is paradoxical, and has produced fascinating and hitherto largely unnoticed discontinuities and incompatibilities between the rhetorical representation of the Court's admissibility decision-making in ongoing Convention reform debates and the published jurisprudence of the Court on those standards of admissibility.