Strasbourg, 03/02/2006 (Agence Europe) - It was with a piece of good news that Luzius Wildhaber, President of the European Court of Human Rights, opened the annual press conference in Strasbourg on 23 January. The Court is doing well. As evidence, the increase in annual productivity. The number of rulings given by the Court in 2005 increased by roughly 54%, going from 718 in 2004 to 1105 in 2005, while the number of cases which ended in a judicial decision went from 20,350 to 27,612 (mainly decisions of inadmissibility), an increase of 36%. In some months, the Court's productivity exceeded the number of petitions lodged. Annually, the number of petitions lodged has stabilised at around 45,000. Another reason for optimism is that new aid from the Member States of the Council of Europe has allowed the Court's budget to be increased and 50 new agents to be employed. Now the work of reforming the workings of the Court has to be pursued. With this in mind, the Court is considering a study by British Judge Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief justice of England and Wales, which proposes a way to reduce the number of inadmissible petitions which clog up the system unnecessarily. Information offices about the Convention, the Court and the conditions for admissibility would be set up to inform citizens across Europe, to provide a first filter and, if necessary, involve the national or European Ombudsman when a judicial process was nor required. At the same time, the Group of the Wise, set up after the Warsaw Summit in May 2005 and chaired by Spaniard Gil Carlos Rodriguez Iglesias, former President of the EU Court of Justice, is continuing its work. It is due to submit an interim report to the Committee of Ministers in May, with the final report to come before the end of the year.
During his press conference, the President of the Court also presented his annual scoreboard of violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, country by country. This showed that Turkey still has the highest number of rulings involving at least one violation (270). Then come Ukraine (119), Greece (100), Russia (81), Italy (67), France (51) and Poland (44). There are twelve countries with between 10 and 30 rulings and twenty seven States have fewer than 10.