Interlaken Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights

[NOTE added on 28 February 2010:

• Click here for the full text of the Interlaken Declaration agreed at the conference.
• Click here for Antoine Buyse's commentary on the declaration.
• Click here for Antoine Buyse's links to the conference page and the special conference site of the Swiss Presidency.
• Click here for links to press coverage of the conference, HT Antoine Buyse.

]

A Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights, among States that are subject to the jurisdiction of that court, will be held February 18-19, 2010, in Interlaken, Switzerland. The purpose of the conference is to enable the Member States to engage in strategic planning for the Court respecting the next decade. According to the official preparatory memorandum, the conference will address two key issues:

• The Court’s large and growing caseload; and
• Problems with enforcement and effect of the Court’s rulings at the Member State level.

The Court identifies the following primary causes for these problems:

• “[M]any applicants are not familiar with either the substantive limits of the Convention or the procedural conditions for admissibility.”
• “The high number of repetitive applications before the Court is an indication that the subsidiarity principle does not operate adequately” (e.g., many Member States allegedly:
• are not providing adequate remedies for human rights violations,
• are permitting individuals to apply to the Court without having exhausted national remedies,
• are failing to enforce the Court’s judgments, or
• are declining to conform their law and practices to Court rulings applicable to other Member States).

To address these problems, the Court proposes several reforms. Of those reform proposals the following involve legal information or communication issues:

• “[S]et up special sections, an applications division …, or another filtering body, … the Court proper ruling only on those cases found admissible”;
• Create a “Human Rights Tribunal [similar to the Court of First Instance of the ECJ] subordinate to the Court” which Tribunal “would deal with admissibility [while] the Court would rule on the merits”;
• Create “a preliminary reference mechanism or possibly an extension of the Court’s advisory competence”;
• Require each State to implement the following corrective measures “at the national level”:
• providing human rights training to its citizens;
• translating the Court’s judgments into the languages of its citizens;
• “execution of national judgments”;
• “solutions for the excessive length of proceedings”; and
• “reopening of proceedings following Strasbourg judgments.”
• Require States to “execute the Court’s judgments promptly”;
• Furnish “human rights training” to the States (see, e.g., the Court’s Warsaw Pilot Project, in which the Court educates potential applicants about the Court’s procedures and substantive human rights law);
• “[E]nsur[e] better dissemination of the Court’s case-law”;
• Authorize “’[c]lass actions’ or collective applications”; and
• Refer “purely repetitive cases to the Committee of Ministers and/or to the States concerned.”

Also of interest to legal informatics researchers is the Court’s description of information- or communication-related steps it has already taken to reduce its caseload or expedite case processing:

• Adding a fifth section (or panel) of judges to the court;
• Deciding on admissibility and the merits at the same time;
• Encouraging settlement;
• Accepting “unilateral declarations of violations”;
• Implementing a “pilot judgment” procedure;
• Simplifying the drafting of judgments;
• Creating “a new order for processing applications based on well-defined criteria”;
• Implementing better data processing tools, and
• “Develop[ing] its Research [and Library] Division.”

For more information on the Interlaken conference and stakeholders’ preparations for it, please see Antoine Buyse’s very informative posts on the ECHR Blog.

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