I thought precedents only matter in the US "common law" framework, but most of the EU is following the "civil law" framework where precedents do not matter. Does this precedent really matter?
It's funny seeing "common law" referred as a US thing when it's literally been in use in the UK for centuries before the US was a thing, and that's where the US inherited it from.
And precedent has it's place in civil law countries too, mostly around clarifying existing legislation in case of ambiguity, but it isn't an automatic ironclad thing.
An interesting quirk of English law is that murder is a common law offence. There is no Act of Parliament proscribing it; it's just something that everybody has always accepted is a crime.
While precedence is not the same thing in civil law as in common law, this is essentially a ruling by the highest European court on the interpretation of a law and its conflict with human rights. These rulings are typically on the matter of principle, so it does effectively "bind" lower courts and because of this the court is very unlikely to take on another case on the same "conflict" (at least before the law has been changed).
It’s a Council of Europe institution (note, not EU), so really there’s no common legal philosophy, just the relevant treaties and conventions.
The European Court of Human Rights’ whole raison d’être is the European Convention on Human Rights, so it interprets laws through the lens of whether they conform to that, and does have its own case law, albeit a short history of it.
