Comments on: The European Court of Human Rights is Fit for Purpose. 2011/09/12/the-european-court-of-human-rights-is-fit-for-purpose/ London MEP European Parliament Tue, 01 Mar 2016 16:56:53 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Jonathan Millins (@euro_jonathan) 2011/09/12/the-european-court-of-human-rights-is-fit-for-purpose/#comment-4881 Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:54:04 +0000 ?p=15303#comment-4881 Whilst I mostly agree with your analysis and description of the European Court of Human Rights, I do think that further reforms are needed. Especially in not allowing duplicate cases to be submitted by different people with little or no alteration of the facts of the case (as you quite often find in cases from Russia). Many thousands of cases are submitted to the Court every year that contain no material evidence for a breach of the Convention, yet, judges and the Court have to evaluate and rule on them.

You can only appreciate the issues the Court faces if you understand the relationship between the Council of Europe and ECHR and Russia. In 2010, ‘Protocol 14’ (which allows for some streamlining of the system) was finally ratified by all members, including Russia. This has allowed an increase in the pace of dealing with cases. I am confident that in future years, you will see a significant drop in the backlog and new cases which are deemed admissible.

The single largest number of cases filed at the Court every year come from Russian citizens – as I say, many files are duplicates of already submitted applications and in many cases they either do not demonstrate a significant new breach of human rights or are applications for a decision on an issue that has already been decided. The new Protocol will allow the Court to make a judgment on the admissibility of cases where applicants fail to demonstrate that they have suffered “significant disadvantage”. It will also allow the Court to group together similar cases.

I would not wish to remove the possibility of citizens applying directly to the Court, however, some mechanism needs to be agreed so that Court officials may reject obviously deficient applications from the start and therefore not cause delay to genuine cases. I also think it should be possible to transfer a case to a national court for a first hearing to determine if there has been a material breach.

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