"2017 was a year marked by an avalanche of requests directly linked to the measures taken after the attempted coup in Turkey", the head of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Guido Raimondi, stated on Thursday 25 January, adding that these requests came "mainly from people placed in detention, especially journalists and judges".
The requests number 30,000 but at this stage the ECHR has declared 27,800 of them inadmissible "for failure to exhaust domestic avenues of appeal" – either because there was no appeal to the constitutional court, or because the ad hoc committee created in Turkey to assess judgments made under the state of emergency was not consulted.
This mechanism based on subsidiarity as a "pillar" of the ECHR thus allows the institution to avoid a bottleneck that could be fatal to it, but it is all the more important that these domestic avenues of appeal are effective, Raimondi admitted, on being asked about the effectiveness of the constitutional court when its ruling concluding the violation of the human rights of two journalists was swept aside by a court of first instance. He refuses to give an opinion at this stage, as he does on whether the operation of the appeals committee is satisfactory, but gives assurances that the issue is being followed closely.
The 2017 results of the ECHR show that the states for which the largest number of rulings were handed down finding at least one violation of the European Convention on Human Rights were Russia (305), Turkey (116), Ukraine (87), Romania (69), Bulgaria (39) and Greece (37).
On the list of awards for countries providing requests are Romania (9,900), Russia (7,500), Turkey (7,500) and Ukraine (7,100). As regards Russia and Ukraine, there is an impact from the crises in Crimea and Donbas, as these involve 3,800 Ukrainian cases and 254 Russian cases. Five inter-state cases are also to be addressed in this context.
The total number of pending cases continues to fall, Raimondi was pleased to note. This decreased from 79,750 to 56 250, which corresponds to a 29% fall compared with 2016. This result can be explained by the use of the simplified single judge procedure applied to the requests that correspond to well-established jurisprudence, through the large number of decisions of inadmissibility based on the failure to exhaust domestic avenues of appeal and, in addition, through the so-called "pilot judgment". Faced with new cases identical to others on which it has already ruled, the Court decided to eliminate these new requests from the list and to send them to the Committee of Ministers, the statutory body of the Council of Europe in charge of ensuring the execution of rulings. It is for this body to verify that the states settle their respective systematic problems definitively.
"This is not an abdication of the ECHR", Raimondi says, "but an implementation of the shared responsibility between the court and the state parties to the convention. The solutions belong to them. It is for them to apply it".
Asked about the impact of the budget crisis experienced by a Council of Europe weakened by the suspension of Russian payments and Turkey's decision to reduce its contribution, the Court clerk gave assurances that this institution, "considered as a priority for the Committee of Ministers", was not currently threatened and this crisis – "must not prevent it from continuing to work on improving how it operates". (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)