June 02, 2023
Tobias Mortier Given Russia’s rather poor track record in terms of its protection of human rights, one might presume that the number of Article 18 violations found by the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) in respect of Russia would be significant. After all, Article 18 provides protection against the misapplication of the Convention […]
November 23, 2022
By Joseph Finnerty[*] Introduction The rule of law crisis in Poland is not new, but the engagement of Article 18 ECHR with this context is. In Juszczyszyn v. Poland, the ECtHR delivered its first Article 18 violation judgment against Poland. The case concerned the legal reforms that the Polish political ruling party (PiS) has adopted […]
August 16, 2022
Over the last couple of years, the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) has been tasked to deal with an enormous amount of cases pertaining to the attempted Turkish coup in 2016. In fact, Turkey currently has the dubious honor of having the second-highest number of applications pending against it before the Court out […]
January 21, 2022
Dr. Ramute Remezaite[1] Introduction Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention), prohibiting the Council of Europe member states’ acting in bad faith, has been put under the spotlight by litigators and the Court in recent years, exposing ulterior practices by states. Azerbaijan’s particularly repressive context for civil society and the political […]
December 08, 2021
By Tobias Mortier Art. 18 is a peculiar provision in the rights catalogue of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the Convention’). Only rarely is it invoked before the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) – and a violation of it is even rarer. Up until now, the Court had only found violations of […]
October 29, 2021
By Tobias Mortier A little political tension in an electoral context is not uncommon. However, the Armenian presidential elections in 2008 were nothing short of riotous. The Court has already dealt with numerous cases in which the events surrounding these elections were contested. For instance, in the case of Mushegh Saghatelyan v. Armenia, the Court […]
April 19, 2021
By Hakan Kaplankaya, former Turkish diplomat, jurist, INSTITUDE member On December 22, 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR/the Court) delivered a landmark judgment against Turkey regarding the prolonged-detention of Selahattin Demirtaş, former leader of pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Unlike the 2nd Section of the Court, which has mostly taken a restrained and […]
February 05, 2021
By Ezgi Yildiz, Project Lead and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Global Governance Centre, the Graduate Institute, Geneva The recent Demirtaş v. Turkey (no. 2) [GC] judgment (application no. 14305/17) stands out not only for its substance but also its tone. The judgment provides an unequivocal solution to the protracted political crisis in Turkey concerning the […]
December 14, 2020
Matteo Mastracci, Ph.D. Researcher at Koç University, and reporter for Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL) In a long-awaited decision, the European Court of Human Rights finally ruled on 10 November 2020 on the case of Sabuncu and Others v. Turkey. The case, better known as the Cumhuriyet trial, named after the newspaper in which […]