When I was first asked to participate in a code-making exercise, it was stimulating and enjoyable, but hard to take seriously. In 1995, the Council of Europe convened a group of politicians, largely from countries which had recently freed themselves from the Soviet empire, and an assortment of academics and public officials. We were to formulate within four days rules for “genuine democracy” and for political finance. Given the wide political and cultural differences between the politicians and the seeming vested interests of some of the representatives of national bureaucracies, it was hard to see how much this motley crew could achieve.

It was a mistake to underestimate the importance of the meeting. It was to lead to the Council of Europe’s “Recommendation Rec (2003)4 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on common rules against corruption in the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns”. And why was this of any significance? Simply because the recommendations in these “common rules” stand to influence the European Court of Human Rights in any future litigation about whether UK laws conform to the European Convention on Human Rights. This Convention is vague but the “common rules” are more specific.

Projects aiming to set out international standards have typically started as exercises in advocacy with purely informal influence. However, they all too often have come to possess a degree of binding authority.

One contentious but potentially influential report was issued in 2012 by the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security of the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). The latter is a body created in 1995 with an aim of countering American notions of democracy with Swedish-inspired models.

International IDEA has subsequently invested heavily in persuading bodies such as the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organisation of American States and the OECD to adopt as a norm the public funding of political parties. Though increasingly common across the globe, popular among professional politicians and disliked by voters, public funding of parties and election campaigns remains controversial and cannot reasonably be regarded as an essential aspect of democratic elections. Indeed, it is strongly resisted by the current UK government. The flow of recommendations by international bodies on the matter may well leave the UK exposed in the future to litigation either in the Strasbourg or Luxembourg courts. In 1998, in the Bowman case, the Strasbourg Court invalidated the longstanding UK ban on independent spending (i.e. not authorised by one of the candidates) in parliamentary elections.

In the international arena, the longstanding English-speaking democracies are outnumbered. There are growing pressures to accept continental European forms of democracy as a legally enforceable standard.