January 17, 2011
When is the duty to investigate possible racist motives triggered in cases of ill-treatment and death in police custody? In one of the latest 2010 judgments (Mižigárová v. Slovakia) dealing with police brutality against a member of an ethnic minority, the Court did not consider that “the authorities had before them information that was sufficient […]
November 16, 2010
Shakespeare suggested that the names of things do not matter, but only their substance. The applicants in Losonci Rose and Rose v. Switzerland disagree. So does the Court, and so do I. The applicants in this case are a couple who wanted to retain their own names after marriage, rather than adopt a double-barreled surname […]
October 14, 2010
Last week, the Court delivered what might well turn out to be a landmark judgment on the issue of sex discrimination; Konstantin Markin v. Russia. The facts seem simple enough: a military serviceman was not entitled to the same parental leave as a military servicewoman would have had in his case. A classic discrimination case. […]
October 11, 2010
A recent case, J.M. v. the United Kingdom, startled our research team. The case concerns a British child support rule that is at first glance counter-intuitive. The rule, from the Child Support Act 1991, states that the parent who does not have the primary care of the children is required to pay child support. So […]
September 23, 2010
The Court has recently declared admissible Gas and Dubois v. France, another major case concerning adoption by homosexuals. Earlier in E.B. v. France, the Court dealt with adoption by a single homosexual and addressed allegations of direct discrimination. Gas and Dubois v. France now confronts the Court with further challenges: the adoption of a same-sex […]
September 17, 2010
From a minority perspective, this week was not a good week in Belgium. On Wednesday, a television broadcast proved that employment agencies cooperate actively with employers who don’t want to hire people with a foreign background (in Belgium the so-called “allochtonen”). An undercover journalist who posed as an employer searching for new employees, asked the […]
September 02, 2010
My post on Aksu v. Turkey received some criticism for not taking the freedom of expression into account. A brief memory-aid: Aksu is the case of a man of Roma origin who complained about degrading stereotypical remarks made about Roma in government-sponsored publications. In a “dictionary for pupils” and a book entitled “The Gypsies of […]
August 11, 2010
Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the recent judgment overturning Prop 8, got me thinking about legitimate aims. I believe the European Court of Human Rights could gain valuable insights from that case. Newspaper readers will be aware that, last week, a federal judge in California rejected the amendment to the California constitution (Proposition 8 ) which banned […]
July 29, 2010
The European Court of Human Rights just rendered a judgment on the issue of stereotyped images of Roma in government-funded publications in Turkey. I think the majority decision (4 to 3) lacks sustained analysis and requires problematization. In the case of Aksu v. Turkey the applicant, mr Aksu, is of Roma origin. He complained about two […]
July 01, 2010
Gay rights are one of the human rights issues of our time. The Strasbourg Court came out with an important but ultimately disappointing ruling on same-sex marriage last week (for a summary of the case, see Lourdes’ post). It is disappointing both for the reasoning and for the outcome (see below). Despite the fact that […]
April 12, 2010
An observer of the Strasbourg case-law should always remember to include the inadmissibility decisions in her research. The changes in the Court’s procedures, introducing committees of three judges and judges sitting alone, have made this more difficult (those decisions are not on HUDOC), yet at the same time have resulted in a situation in which […]
April 12, 2010
The judgment delivered on 1 April 2010 in the case of S.H. and others v. Austria concerned the use of donors for in vitro fertilization (IVF). The applicants, two couples, wished to have children, but medical reasons impeded both couples from having them the biological way. They had no choice but to rely on IVF […]