Strasbourg, 31/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - At his annual press conference on Thursday 30 January, the president of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Dean Spielmann of Luxembourg, said that 2013 had been a remarkable year.
The Council of Europe's flagship body has published figures that confirm the trend, begun in 2012, after years of exponential rise in cases waiting to be heard by the court. Spielmann said that the number of pending cases has now fallen below the symbolic threshold of 100,000 to 99,900. That is still a lot of cases, but the number of pending cases stood at 151,600 in 2011, falling to 128,100 in 2012. The president of the court explained that they are now back to the 2008 figure and the court is luckily no longer a victim of its own success. The court has not improved the backlog simply as a result of improving human rights in the Council of Europe's 47 member states, but rather as the result of a reform process highlighted by the conferences at Interlaken in 2010, Izmir in 2011 and Brighton in 2012.
Since 2011, the court has been appointing fewer judges for each case and also dealing with similar cases jointly. Under Protocol 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the court now has a department carrying out “triage” to filter out inappropriate cases. The triage department is headed by a single judge and comprises non-judicial rapporteurs who are leading clerks of the court, and notes cases where the six-month deadline for lodging cases has been missed or cases for which appeals procedures in the member states have not yet been exhausted. Another positive, said Spielmann, is the way the member states are increasingly abiding by Court of Human Rights case law, thus reducing the numbers of repeat cases. Thanks to the introduction of new appeals bodies in Turkey, it has gone down from second to fifth place in the league table of pending cases, but Turkey is still the country with the second highest number of rulings against it in 2013. Turkey had 118 rulings against it in 2013, almost as many as Russia's 119 cases of violations of at least one article of the European Convention of Human Rights. In 2013, Moscow was found guilty 63 times for violating the right to freedom and security and 49 times for inhuman or degrading treatment. Russia is top of the list for pending cases with 16,800 open cases, 1.8% of the total.
Spielmann pointed out that the accession agreement for the European Union to join the European Convention of Human Rights was finalised on 5 April 2013. When adopted, he said, membership will enable EU citizens to submit the action of EU institutions, which is increasingly important in daily life, to the same control as the European Court of Human Rights already exercises for the institutions of individual countries. (VL/transl.fl)