A record 3,691 rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are deemed to have been implemented, explains the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers (CM) in its 2017 report, published on Thursday 5 April.
By way of comparison, 2,066 cases were closed in 2016 and the CM says these highly encouraging results are due to continued effort to boost dialogue and exchange of experience among countries, leading to a rise of more than 30% in the number of case closed in which structural problems were highlights, cases that had been pending for more than five years.
The number of pending cases has fallen by nearly 25% to around 7,500 today, compared with more than 11,000 at the end of 2014. The volume of structural problems has fallen by nearly 7%.
There has been tangible progress in domains such as control of police action, bad detention conditions, shortcomings in the justice system, return or compensation for property nationalised by former communist regimes and excessive restrictions on the freedom of assembly and association.
Other advances include better penalties for torture and hate crime, better protection against unlawful detention, better risk assessment for asylum procedures and extension of the right of family regrouping to same-sex couples.
A number of challenges remain, however, to be tackled in terms of delays in implementing rulings, repeat cases and specific issues with post-conflict areas and zones where conflict is on hold.
On 13 and 14 April, the Danish Presidency of the Council of Europe will hold a high-level conference on reform of the European Convention of Human Rights system, as part of a process that began in 2010 with a conference in Interlaken and continued with conferences in Izmir (2011), Brighton (2012) and Brussels (2015).
The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe makes its own contribution by publishing regular reports on implementation of ECHR rulings. The previous report was unveiled in June 2017 and generated a raft of recommendations for member states and the Council of Ministers. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)