Dear readers,

In February, we presented you with this year’s edition of our annual Strasbourg Observers Best & Worst Poll, where we asked you to vote for your preferred candidates as shortlisted for the categories of Best Judgment of 2025, Worst Judgment of 2025, and Best Separate Opinion of 2025. The votes have been counted and we are excited to announce the results.

BEST JUDGMENT OF 2025

First up, in the category of Best Judgment of 2025, the winner is…  Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia!

In Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia the Grand Chamber ruled on Russia’s international responsibility for human rights violations in the context of its hostilities against Ukraine. It found violations of nearly all Convention rights for reason of inter alia unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, forced labour, suppression of religion, expression and protest, destruction and seizure of property, attacks on civilians, forced displacement, filtration measures, suppression of Ukrainian-language education, indoctrination, and the transfer and adoption of Ukrainian children in Russia. It also found Russia responsible for the downing of flight MH17, including for its failure to investigate the incident. 

A deserved winner, this landmark judgment stands out for its symbolic significance as a principled condemnation of Russia’s actions which seek to ‘undermine the very fabric of the democracy on which the Council of Europe and its member States are founded by their destruction of individual freedoms, their suppression of political liberties and their blatant disregard for the rule of law’ (para 177). Importantly however, it has also been widely applauded for its clear and coherent approach to some longstanding points of doctrinal controversy surrounding such issues as jurisdiction, attribution, derogation and the relationship between the ECHR and IHL. 

You can read more in our two blogposts on the judgment by Giorgi Nakashidze and Davit Khachatryan.

The overall top three in this category were:

First place: Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia

Second place: I.C. v. the Republic of Moldova 

Third place: M.P. and Others v. Greece 

WORST JUDGMENT OF 2025

For worst judgment, although with a razor-thin lead over the second place runner-up, the winner is… Semenya v. Switzerland!

Semenya concerned the fair-trial, discrimination and private life complaints by Caster Semenya, the world and Olympic middle-distance running champion, who was required by World Athletics’ rules to lower her testosterone levels in order to compete under its ‘differences of sex development (DSD) regulations’. The case raised two major issues. The first was whether World Athletics’ DSD regulations violated intersex athletes’ rights to private life and non-discrimination. The second was whether the compulsory jurisdiction of the ‘Court of Arbitration for Sport‘ (CAS) and the very limited review possibilities against its arbitral awards before the Swiss Federal Supreme Court violated athletes’ rights to an effective remedy and fair trial. 

The Grand Chamber sidestepped the first issue by declaring the complaint inadmissible for lack of sufficient jurisdictional link between the challenged DSD regulation and Switzerland. This was a marked deviation from the Chamber judgment in which the Court itself stressed that refusing jurisdiction in these kinds of cases ‘would risk barring access to the Court for an entire category of individuals, that of professional female athletes, which would not be in keeping with the spirit, object and purpose of the Convention.’

The Grand Chamber did find an Article 6 §1 violation with regards to the second issue. It however did so in a roundabout way, sidestepping the more systemic problems the Semenya case raised. The Court itself recognised that a ‘structural imbalance […] characterises the relationship between sportspersons and the bodies which govern their respective sports’ and that this makes the imposition of mandatory and exclusive jurisdiction of an arbitral tribunal like CAS on sportspersons problematic (para. 209). Its response to this was to impose on the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (as the competent annulment Court) the obligation under article 6§1 ECHR to conduct a ‘particularly rigorous examination’ of the civil law appeal lodged with it against CAS’ arbitral awards. Not only is this an unclear standard of protection which does not align easily with the mandate of annulment courts in international arbitration, it also leaves unchallenged the problematic status of the CAS as a ‘tribunal established by law’ under Article 6 ECHR (see our blogpost on these issues). 

You can check out our blog-symposium on the Semenya judgment for further critical discussion of the judgment.

The overall top three in this category were:

First place:  Semenya v. Switzerland

Second place: S.S. and Others v. Italy

Third place: Mansouri v. Italy

BEST SEPARATE OPINION OF 2025

Finally, in the category of best separate opinion of 2025, the winner selected by our readers in a landslide victory is… Judge Pavli in Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia!

In Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia the applicants included various individuals and media outlets who had expressed themselves critically regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, the Russian government labelled them ‘extremists’ and ‘foreign agents’, and subjected them to criminal and administrative sanctions on account of their ‘discrediting the military’ and ‘disseminating knowingly false information’. In its judgment, the Court found violations of Articles 3, 5, 8 and 10.

Interestingly, Judge Pavli’s Concurring Opinion did not necessarily analyse the Chamber’s reasoning. Rather, his opinion pertained to the manner in which the Court addressed systemic issues permeating the state of democracy and the rule of law in ‘democratically challenged systems’. Taking stock of the shortcomings in the Court’s arsenal of concepts, techniques and remedies which serve to aid the Court in its mission to uphold democracy in its Member States, he remarked that the Court had ‘not equipped itself sufficiently’. What is more, noting that other European States are currently walking down the road toward antidemocratism, he doubted whether the Court is currently prepared to address this in a more adequate fashion.

Judge Pavli’s opinion found significant traction among scholars, practitioners and ECHR experts. On our blog, Burak Tahsin Bahce analysed the opinion and praised the meaningful contributions raised in it. Elsewhere, too, commentators praised the opinion for asking the right questions or explored the question of what lessons the Court ought to learn from Russia’s trajectory in the Council of Europe on the basis of Judge Pavli’s opinion. It does therefore not come as a major surprise that our readers so overwhelmingly voted for this opinion as best separate opinion of 2025. It appears that the state of democracy and the manner in which the Court addresses this in its case law remains an important topic to our readers – and to our team at Strasbourg Observers too.

Read Burak Tahsin Bahce’s analysis of this separate opinion on our blog here.

The overall top three in this category were:

First place: Judge Pavli in Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia

Second place: Judge Arnardóttir, joined by Judges Serghides and Šimáčková in Ships Oil Waste Collector B.V. and Others v. the Netherlands

Third place: Judge Elósegui in N.D. v. Switzerland

We would like to thank everyone for participating in the voting! It is wonderful to see such active engagement and participation amongst our readership. We will be back with a new ‘Best and Worst’ voting poll next year and until then we will continue in our mission to keep you updated and informed on the most recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights.