August 20, 2025
By Dr. Ufuk Yeşil On July 8 2025, the European Court of Human Rights’ (the ECtHR or the Court) addressed violations stemming from the prolonged detention of Selahattin Demirtaş, the former HDP co-chair, in Selahattin Demirtaş v. Türkiye (No. 4), exposing systemic judicial abuses targeting political dissent in Türkiye. This blog post analyzes this judgment, and connects it […]
January 07, 2025
Alexis Galand The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) in J.B. v. Malta highlights systemic deficiencies in Malta’s judicial and administrative systems, revealing how rule of law failures undermine the protection of fundamental rights. In this case, the Court found that Malta had unlawfully detained unaccompanied minors for six months in […]
August 19, 2022
By Lorenzo Bernardini Introduction How high is the burden of proof on the foreigner who claims to have suffered degrading treatments? In which cases may the authorities adopt coercive methods against a foreigner already detained? The European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’, ‘the ECtHR’ or ‘the Strasbourg Court’) was called upon to answer these […]
March 12, 2021
By Andrea Broderick (Assistant Professor of International and European Law, Maastricht University, The Netherlands) and Delia Ferri (Professor of Law, Maynooth University, Ireland) Delia Ferri and Andrea Broderick have collaborated on several recent publications, including the first textbook on International and European Disability Law and Policy: Texts, Cases and Materials (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and […]
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 […]
November 10, 2017
By Emilie Rebsomen, Méryl Recotillet and Caroline Teuma (Aix-Marseille University) The internment of mentally ill offenders has a long history. The first safety measures were envisaged in the writings of the criminologists of the 18th and 19th century. Since then, various and varied security and safety measures have been introduced, security internment being one of […]
September 14, 2017
By Rebecca Deruiter – PhD Researcher, Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), Ghent University[1] Two rulings convicted the Belgian state for violating Article 3 in the case of Rooman v. Belgium and Article 2 in the case of Tekin and Arslan v. Belgium. Both these cases concern mentally-ill offenders for which the Belgian […]
June 29, 2017
By Prof. Dr. Ton Liefaard, Professor of Children’s Rights / UNICEF Chair in Children’s Rights, Leiden Law School, Leiden University, The Netherlands[1] The Zherdev v. Ukraine judgement of 27 April 2017 by the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: the Court) further augments the Court’s line of recognising the vulnerable position of children in police […]