International judicial discourse and non-derogatory language use: A case study on ECtHR judgments

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) protects human rights and fundamental freedoms and promotes democracy among the 46 members of the Council of Europe. It therefore protects people against any form of discrimination, including discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Over time, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been called to apply the rights enshrined in the ECHR to cases involving LGBTIQ+ people several times. While ECtHR case law dealing with gender-related issues and LGBTIQ+ persons’ rights have been extensively investigated from a legal standpoint, the same cannot be said about the linguistic dimension of these decisions, which has received very limited attention. This chapter intends to narrow the gap by exploring ECtHR judicial discourse and, in particular, a corpus of ECtHR judgments in English compiled in Sketch Engine which comprises two subcorpora: the first including majority opinions and the second containing the relevant separate – concurring or dissenting – opinions. The study has two aims. The first is to extract gender identity labels in order to verify whether they appear in textual material either directly produced by the judges or quoted from external sources. The second is to focus on two apparently neutral nouns, namely lifestyle and rights, which – when accompanied by gender identity labels – may be perceived as offensive or derogatory. The main purpose is to assess whether the use of gender identity labels in the two subcorpora is compliant with the definitions and guidelines for respectful use of language.