Guest post by M. Schaap-Rubio Imbers, PhD Candidate international public law, Erasmus School of Law
On the 8th of November 2016, the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber delivered its judgment in Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v Hungary. The applicant NGO (Magyar Helsinki Bizottság) complained that the refusal of police departments to disclose information on the appointment of public defenders upon their request represented a breach of its rights as set out in article 10 ECHR. The Court held by fifteen votes to two that there has indeed been a violation of article 10. This judgment is the latest ruling on access to public interest information, and as such a very welcome elaboration of the Court’s position on the right of access to public interest information under article 10 ECHR.
Considering that others have already provided a good overview of the background and what is at stake in this judgement (here) and provided a general discussion of the case at hand (here), in this contribution I will focus particularly on the criteria established by the Court for access to public interest information under article 10 ECHR.
I am most pleased to announce the publication, with Routledge, of my book Resolving Conflicts between Human Rights: The Judge’s Dilemma. The book is based on my PhD research. Its first 20-odd pages – including the entire introduction – can be consulted here. This should give interested readers a good idea of what the book is about.
This is its first page:
Under the influence of the global spread of human rights, legal disputes across the globe are increasingly framed in human rights terms. In a myriad of court cases the world over, opposing parties can invoke human rights norms in support of their competing claims. Take, for instance, a labour dispute in which a church invokes its religious freedom to shield it from the complaint of a lay employee, who claims that his dismissal for having engaged in an extramarital relationship has violated his right to privacy. Or take the case of a politician who sues a newspaper for defamation, claiming that a corruption story on the newspaper’s front page has breached her right to reputation. Or the case of an adopted person who seeks a court order for the disclosure of information related to her origins, against the express wishes of her biological mother, who had given birth to her anonymously.
When confronted with such cases in which human rights conflict, judges face a dilemma. In ‘traditional’ human rights cases, in which human rights are opposed by the public interest, the former arguably function as ‘trumps’ over or ‘shields’ against the latter. Human rights, in other words, hold special normative force over the public interest invoked to justify their infringement. In ‘traditional’ human rights cases, the scales of justice are thus loaded in favour of human rights. When human rights conflict with each other, however, there are no ‘trumps’ to be played or ‘shields’ to be wielded. Instead, often difficult choices have to be made between superior norms that deserve principled equal respect. I do not mean to imply, here, that ‘traditional’ human rights cases are always easy to resolve, nor that conflicts between human rights invariably make for complex cases. But human rights conflicts do pose particular challenges for adjudication. Those challenges are identified and tackled throughout this book.
The central argument of this book is that human rights conflicts are uniquely problematic, in that they are special kinds of hard cases that require a distinct resolution framework. The need for such a distinct framework flows directly from the special normative force of human rights, as ‘trumps’ over or ‘shields’ against the public interest. Taking the special normative force of human rights seriously, I posit, necessitates a departure from the proportionality test in the specific domain of human rights conflicts. Throughout this book, I question the relevance of the proportionality test, ubiquitous in human rights reasoning, to conflicts between human rights. Instead, I propose an alternative (or refined) framework, specifically designed to tackle the hard cases in which human rights collide.
By Ellen Desmet, assistant professor of migration law at Ghent University.
On 13 October 2016, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found in B.A.C. v. Greece that the Greek state’s omission to decide on an asylum application during more than twelve years violated Article 8 as well as Article 13 in conjunction with Article 8. The Court also considered that there would be a violation of Article 3 in conjunction with Article 13, if the applicant would be returned to Turkey without an assessment ex nunc by the Greek authorities of his personal situation.
This is the first time that the Court finds that an asylum seeker’s prolonged precarious and uncertain situation, due to an unjustified lack of action by the government as regards his asylum request, constitutes a violation of the right to respect for private life as guaranteed by Article 8 ECHR.
The judgment (only in French) has been discussed by Markos Karavias on EJIL: Talk!, and was mentioned by Benoit Dhondt on this blog in a comparative perspective, namely as a promising decision standing in contrast to the striking out of Khan v. Germany by the Grand Chamber. This post provides a complementary analysis of the Court’s considerations under Article 8 ECHR.
By Corina Heri, PhD candidate at the University of Zürich / Visiting Scholar at Ghent University
On 27 October 2016, the Court published the Third Section’s decision in Kamenica and Others v. Serbia. That case concerns the alleged ill-treatment of 67 persons who fled Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict that broke out there in 1992 and who were subsequently interned in a Serbian detention camp. The Third Section applied the six-month rule to the case, finding that it had been brought out of time. Its decision raises questions about the strictness of the six-month rule and the application of a statute of limitations to grievous alleged violations of Article 3 ECHR. Granted, the application of a rigid time limit for bringing applications to Strasbourg fosters certainty and ensures that the proceedings before the Court take place within a useful time frame. However, decisions such as this one indicate that, in certain types of cases – here, a particularly grievous one that stood to be investigated in a post-conflict scenario – the Court’s emphasis of a strict time limit can seem decidedly formalistic.
