October 29, 2024
By Sarah Ganty In Dian, the Court flushes the promise of the Lăcătuş judgment that ‘begging, as a form of the right to call on another person to obtain his or her assistance, must evidently be regarded as a basic freedom’ (§59) down the drain. The Court adopts a skewed vision of poverty, finding in […]
June 28, 2024
By Theresa Lanzl and Harriet Ní Chinnéide On the 18th of April, the ECtHR rejected a complaint from Russian musician, Philip Kirkorov, concerning the Lithuanian authorities’ decision to ban him from entering the country. After engaging in a full proportionality assessment, the Court found that his complaint was manifestly ill-founded and proportionate to the legitimate […]
April 12, 2024
Eva Brems In a previous blogpost I wondered whether scholars and teachers of the ECHR can really understand how the Court interprets the Convention, if we do not know what happens in the large majority of cases, in particular those dismissed as inadmissible by a single judge in a four-line decision devoid of motivation. This […]
April 09, 2024
Eva Brems ‘The European Court as the main violator of human rights’, it said on a PowerPoint slide in my ECHR class this semester. This was a presentation by a guest speaker: an attorney with a lot of experience with ECtHR procedures. I had simply invited him to talk about this experience, but he had […]
September 15, 2023
By Emma Várnagy
May 24, 2023
Veronica Botticelli On 20th April 2023, the European Court on Human Rights (‘the Court’ or ‘the ECtHR’) published its unanimous admissibility decision in the Georgia v. Russia (IV) case, adding another ‘brick’ to its ever-growing case law concerning inter-State proceedings. The present inter-State application stems from a set of facts and events whose (il)legality vis-à-vis […]
April 14, 2023
by Veronica Botticelli On 2nd March 2023, the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’ or ‘the ECtHR’) delivered its judgment in the Croatian Radio-Television v. Croatia case, declaring – by a narrow majority – the application admissible under Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), but unanimously holding that there has […]
February 14, 2023
By Charly Derave and Hania Ouhnaoui On 19 May 2022, the European Court of Human Rights communicated its admissibility decision in the case of M. v. France, which deals with “normalising” medical treatments of intersex persons (i.e. those who are born with sex characteristics that do not fit the typical definition of the female and […]
August 11, 2021
By Maria Kotsoni, PhD researcher at the Department of Law of the European University Institute Just a few months after the inadmissibility judgement of Le Mailloux v. France, another inadmissibility decision was adopted in a case related to states’ socio-economic management of the COVID-19 crisis. Only this time it was the European Committee of Social […]
June 18, 2021
By Alan Greene* Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic and the petitions challenging many of the exceptional powers enacted by states across Europe, cases are now beginning to trickle though to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR; the Court). In a blog post on this website last year, I cautioned against the dangers […]
May 19, 2021
Veronika Fikfak is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, where she is leading the ERC Project Human Rights Nudge team (ERC 803891), which looks at how and when states change their behaviour in response to ECtHR judgments. We use computational methods to analyse large datasets of ECtHR case law and follow up processes […]
November 10, 2020
By Justin M. Loveland The European Court of Human Rights has made important contributions to the development of international human rights jurisprudence, influencing not only the domestic jurisprudence of its member European states but the practices of states outside the European system, other regional human rights systems, and international law more broadly. This well-deserved influence […]
October 14, 2020
By Daniella Lock (Doctoral Candidate and Teaching Fellow, UCL Faculty of Laws, University College London) Last month, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) handed down a decision that the application regarding the compatibility of the exercise of UK hacking powers made in Privacy International and others v United Kingdom was inadmissible. This was on […]
April 06, 2020
This blogpost was written by Niklas Barke, PhD Candidate, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University On the 11th of March, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) issued its decisions in Grimmark v. Sweden and Steen v. Sweden, two cases casting light on the issue of refusal by healthcare professionals to participate in […]
January 17, 2020
Beril Önder: PhD Candidate, University of Strasbourg (Institut de Recherches Carré de Malberg) and Ghent University (Human Rights Centre) The case of Razvozzhayev v. Russia and Ukraine and Udaltsov v. Russia[1] concerned the conviction of two men for organising “mass disorder” in a political rally at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on 6 May 2012. The […]
August 29, 2019
On 16 July, the Court delivered its judgment in the case of Zhdanov and others v. Russia. The case concerns the refusal by the Russian authorities to register two LGBT rights organisations because they were considered extremist organisations on account of the allegedly immoral character of their activities. In this judgment, the Court found a […]
May 22, 2019
By Dr. Dániel A. Karsai, attorney at law, Dániel Karsai Law Firm The Commissioner of Human Rights of the Council of Europe recently issued a report following her visit to Hungary where she made the following rather astonishing statement: “Human rights violations in Hungary have a negative effect on the whole protection system and the […]
November 16, 2016
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 […]
August 29, 2016
By Helena De Vylder Once again, in the decision in Bulgarian Helsinki Committee v Bulgaria, the ECtHR had the opportunity to rule on the legal standing of an NGO when de facto representing two mentally disabled adolescents, who died in an institution. The ECtHR applied the criteria it established in Centre for Legal Resources on […]
June 09, 2016
By Helena De Vylder In the inadmissibility decision delivered on 26 April 2016 in the case of N. v. Russia and M. v. Russia, the Court rejects the petition for lack of standing of the applicants’ representative. The victims were unable to formally appoint their representative by signing a ‘power of attorney-document’, since they disappeared, […]