April 18, 2022
On 24 March 2022, the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter ‘the European Court’) found the Wikimedia Foundation’s application inadmissible in relation to an access blocking decision involving Wikipedia, issued by a single judge in Turkey which lasted 2 years 8 months and 24 days. This article will provide a critical overview of the legal […]
April 11, 2022
By Elvira Loibl Introduction The case concerned the decision by the Norwegian authorities to allow the adoption of a child by a ‘Norwegian Christian’ foster family against the wishes of his mother, a Muslim Somali refugee. The judgment seems to reflect the new Zeitgeist regarding adoptions, which came to be viewed more critically within the […]
April 07, 2022
By Pieter Cannoot On 17 February 2022, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in the case of Y. v. Poland. The Court unanimously found no violation of Article 8 of the Convention (ECHR), and no violation of Article 14 taken together with Article 8. The case concerned a trans man who had […]
April 01, 2022
By Dirk Voorhoof, Human Rights Centre UGent and Legal Human Academy The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has recently delivered a judgment in which, for the first time, it refers to the notion of SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation). In its judgment of 15 March 2022 in the case of OOO Memo v. […]
March 25, 2022
By Daniel Krotov and Yannick Schoog On 3 February 2022, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR; the Court) handed down yet another judgement on compensation for a child’s erroneously undetected disability in the aftermaths of the French “loi anti-Perruche”. Over 15 years after Draon and Maurice, the Court reached a similar conclusion but opted for a […]
March 22, 2022
By Aurélie Van Baelen On the early morning of 24 February 2022, when Russian tanks crossed the border into Ukraine, brutally invading sovereign territory, Europe entered a new era. After weeks of build-up tensions alongside the Russian-Ukrainian border, and the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, the Russian President dared to do what many feared, but hoped he would […]
March 17, 2022
By Philip Leach [i] The brutal, unprovoked and illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022, has resulted in the swift utilisation of the machinery of international law. Ukraine itself instigated proceedings at the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. On 28 February, Karim Khan QC, the […]
March 14, 2022
By Sarah Ganty One might expect that with the emphasis placed on the best interests of the child in recent years (even decades), the issue of surrogacy would not be so haphazardly approached by the ECtHR. And yet the patchwork quilt of protection afforded to children (and their parents) born from surrogacy is strikingly insufficient, […]
March 09, 2022
By Maïté De Rue The Open Society European Policy Institute (OSEPI, a branch of the Open Society Foundations network) submitted on 24 January 2022 a collective complaint against Bulgaria to the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), the body of the Council of Europe that monitors States’ compliance with the European Social Charter. OSEPI claims […]
March 02, 2022
By Diana Dimitrova Introduction In the past years, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has been asked numerous times to examine different aspects of the Council of Europe’s Member States’ (secret) surveillance regimes, ranging from (mass) secret surveillance against their own residents to bulk surveillance or interception of electronic communications coming from abroad. […]
February 01, 2022
By Ellen Vandennieuwenhuysen On the 7th of December 2021, the Grand Chamber issued its long awaited judgement in the Savran-case, concerning the expulsion of a Turkish national with paranoid schizophrenia from Denmark. Contrary to the Chamber, the Grand Chamber found no violation of Article 3 ECHR, as the health risks did not reach the high […]
January 28, 2022
By Dr. Cathérine Van de Graaf and Reza Khabook In this blogpost, we zoom in on the Chamber judgment of Ali Riza v. Switzerland. Some might recognise the name of the applicant. Indeed, on an earlier occasion, M. Ömer Kerim Ali Rıza (together with three amateur football players and one referee) brought a case against […]
January 25, 2022
By Meri Baghdasaryan Standard Verlagsgesellschaft MBH v. Austria (No. 3) represents an interesting development in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’, ‘the Court’) on user-generated content and anonymous speech online. This case stands out as it concerns the liability of host providers for refusal to disclose anonymous user data for […]
January 12, 2022
By Ash Stanley-Ryan International law walks a tightrope between the rights of sovereign States and the rights of those who comprise them. Tip too far to either side and the system breaks – sovereignty either becomes unbridled power, or becomes meaningless. This delicate balancing is most evident when sovereign power and human rights directly collide, […]
December 28, 2021
By Sjoerd Lopik Today marks the second anniversary of the Urgenda climate ruling of the Supreme Court (Hoge Raad) of the Netherlands (a translation of the ruling can be accessed here). With its ruling, the Supreme Court finalised the first case in which a national court issued a specific order to a government to reduce […]
December 22, 2021
By Dr. Cathérine Van de Graaf and Yannick Schoog Introduction On the 26th of October 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR; the Court) answered the question of whether or not a fixed age limit to qualify for a housing subsidy for ‘young families’ was discriminatory in the negative. The case of Šaltinytė v. […]
December 17, 2021
Introduction Bartolo Parnis and Others v. Malta (Bartolo Parnis) is the last in a series of judgments in which Maltese landlords have been contesting before the ECtHR the remedy afforded to them by the domestic Constitutional Court, after concluding that strict rent controls were in breach of their property rights. The finding of such a […]
December 14, 2021
By Naoual El Yattouti In the case Polat v. Austria, the mother of a deceased child complained that the carrying out of a post-mortem despite her and her husband’s objections based on religious reasons, violated her rights under Articles 8, 9 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hereafter: the Convention). The European […]
December 03, 2021
by Jenny Sandvig, Hannah Cecilie Brænden and Peter Dawson In one of the first climate cases to be decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions (ENNHRI) has submitted a joint third-party intervention. The intervention, a first by national human rights institutions (NHRIs) in an international […]
November 30, 2021
By Dr Kyriaki Patsianta In the case of X v. Poland, the ECtHR found that there had been a violation of articles 14 and 8 of the Convention in respect of a homosexual mother, who alleged that the removal of her youngest child from her custody, after her former husband obtained a change in the […]