Chapter 2 turns to the period directly after ratification, from 1954 to 1962, and shows how this was a remarkable lively period.

It makes two distinct claims. First, it contests the pervasive image that the Convention was ‘asleep’ in the domestic legal context. Rather, the Convention was immediately tried and tested and entered the domestic context in a flurry of heated activity, as litigants and other players set out their campaigns to define what the Convention would mean.

Second, it argues that the restrictive policy of the European Commission of Human Rights was a conscious legal strategy. Following the experiences of the Dutch member of the Commission and the national interaction with the European institutions, it can be argued how restraint was indeed part of a conscious effort to let states accept the right of individual petition. Simultaneously, however, the European Court embarked on campaigns to make the Court relevant.

The chapter ends in 1962 with failure on both the domestic and the European levels to make the Convention into something more than a distant document. These failures were essential in setting the stage for the Convention’s perceived legal irrelevance in the following two decades.

Chapter 4 builds on the fourth, as it shows how European human rights were transformed in ‘the age of activism’, 1968–1979.

Crucially, it shows how these grassroots developments predated the legal revolution and formed a necessary precondition for the legal changes which followed later. This follows individual activists, lawyers and academics in their turn to Strasbourg. As some of their cases got into the European system, it provoked a reaction within the Committee of Ministers which had a lasting impact on the system as whole.

For as an answer to the complaints coming in from below, the Dutch government itself set out on a remarkable campaign to energize the European Court. It set out to change the referral policy of the Commission which, famously restrictive, almost never sent cases to the European Court.

Yet with the rise in prominence of human rights, also the question of the ‘overseas territories’ returned. In the lead-up to the independence of Suriname, human rights were deliberately kept at bay. European human rights emerged as points of contention in the Kingdom, with the Antilles embracing a close connection to the European system and Suriname eager to break free from it.