structural:summarization, stylistic:tone, structural:reformatting
Effects

Because the living instrument doctrine prioritizes whether there is a European consensus in a certain interpretation of a Convention obligation, it is closely related to the Convention interpretation concepts of autonomous concepts and margin of appreciation. In cases where the Court did not find a European consensus on a particular issue, such as Sheffield and Horsham v United Kingdom (1998) on the subject of sex-reassignment surgery, it was much less likely to find a violation because it considered that the state had a wide margin of appreciation on how to treat a given issue. In the early 2000s, the Court loosened its reliance on European consensus and began to consider a trend in member states' laws sufficient to find that present-day conditions had changed with regard to a particular issue according to the living instrument doctrine.