The Ministerial Conference in Interlaken on the future of the European Court of Human Rights started today. At a Conference the States will take decisions which could bring welcome reform to relieve the Court’s backlog of cases. Conversely, the decisions taken could undermine a body that has provided redress for the victims of human rights violations in Europe for 50 years.
Before the Conference 156 organizations from 36 CoE member states issued a joint-appeal in which prompt States to inform the public about the debates and consult civil society in the lead-up to the Conference and throughout the reform process which follows it.
47 states’ respect for the Convention rights of some 800 million people is monitored primarily by the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg. The Court makes binding judgments in cases where individuals claim that their Convention rights have been violated and that the state has not granted redress. The implementation of the Court’s judgments is supervised by the Committee of Ministers, representing all 47 Council of Europe states.
Right now the Court faces difficult challenges in light of its resources, as a result of the enormous number of individual applications being lodged (nearly 50,000 application forms in 2008), coupled with the backlog of cases pending before it (more than 110,000). If states complied with their clearly established obligations under the Convention, the number of applications to the Court would be significantly reduced.
Therefore in the joint-statement NGOs propose the following:
1) States must take concerted action to ensure greater respect for human rights and must provide effective domestic remedies when rights are violated.
2) Reforms to the European Court of Human Rights should ensure that the fundamental right of individual petition is preserved and not further curtailed; there is an efficient, fair and effective screening of applications received; judgments are given within a reasonable time, particularly in cases where time is of the essence, or that raise repetitive issues where the Court’s case law is clear and those that arise from systemic problems; the Court is given adequate financial and human resources, without adversely impacting the budgets of other Council of Europe human rights mechanisms and bodies; solutions to the problems faced by the Court, are devised on the basis of informed analysis, transparent evaluation of both the root of the problems and recent and future reforms.
3) The role of the Committee of Ministers in supervising states’ implementation of the Court’s judgments needs to be strengthened, not weakened. Its methods should be further developed and, the Department of Execution of judgments, which assists with this task, urgently needs reinforcement.
What is needed is political will, emphasize the NGOs.
And some of the recent proposals to charge applicants fees, or add new, more restrictive admissibility criteria would undermine the accessibility of the Court. Also unacceptable are the proposals to give the Court discretion to decide on which admissible cases it renders judgment; or to lessen the powers of the Committee of Ministers and the Department of Execution of Judgments to supervise the implementation of Court judgments
See the full text of the joint-statement (with signatories) here.
© 2012 Human Rights Monitoring Institute