The essay explores the impact of the Court of Strasburg on human rights protection’s procedures and achievements at the national level, with particular regard to the Italian legal system, arguing that its impact is one of the causes of the current crisis of fundamental rights. From a Constitutional Law perspective, the essay explores how the new uni-versalism of human rights, grounded in the notion of cooperative constitutionalism, affects the protection of rights and it wonders how to guarantee – in a context characterized by a shift of decision-making powers, towards technocratic (mainly international) organs – the accountability and the democratic legitimacy of national constitutional powers. The analysis allows one to observe the most recent developments of the so called multilevel protection of human rights and to identify its main problems. Having acknowledged that the expansion of rights – and their aspiration to go further national regulations and protections – appears strictly linked to the reallocation of judicial power at the ultrastate level and, more generally, to the notion of globalization of law, the paper tries to identify some revisions that could be proposed while respecting the enormous contribution of the Court to the protection of human rights.
