November 02, 2023
By Dr. Betül Durmuş I remember the first time I learned about Article 132 of the Turkish Civil Code (‘TCC’) in the family law classes in Turkey. This provision imposes a 300-day waiting period for divorced women to remarry unless they medically prove they are not pregnant. As a young woman and a law student, […]
October 03, 2023
By Harriet Ní Chinnéide In the wake of the digital revolution, questions surrounding the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten have come to the fore. With the digitalisation of press archives, what once required extensive archival research can now be discovered – even sometimes accidentally – through a simple online search. This […]
August 29, 2023
By Eva Sevrin Ghadamian v Switzerland is one of the rare cases where the European Court of Human Rights decides that the State is under a positive obligation to regularize an irregularly residing migrant. Even more rare perhaps, is the fact that the Court finds this obligation under the right to private life (Article 8). […]
May 30, 2023
by Giulio Fedele, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, giulio.fedele@uniroma1.it With its latest decision in the case of Buhuceanu and Others v. Romania on 23 May 2023, the European Court of Human Rights returned to the subject of same-sex couples and legal recognition. To no-one’s surprise, the Court confirmed what it had already established just five […]
February 21, 2023
By Maija Dahlberg In Beeler v Switzerland the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had to balance between its far-reaching human rights interpretations and the principle of state sovereignty. Concretely, the case concerned an interesting interpretative question whether to extend the scope of applicability of Article 8 ECHR to social welfare benefits.
September 30, 2022
by Zoe L. Tongue and Lewis Graham On the 20th September 2022, the European Court of Human Rights handed down its judgment in Y.P. v Russia, a case concerning the non-consensual sterilisation of a 28-year-old women during a Caesarean section. The Court’s dismissal of the arguments made under Article 3 appears out of step with […]
August 30, 2022
By Andrea Broderick On 31 May 2022, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) published its ruling in Arnar Helgi Lárusson v. Iceland. The applicant is a wheelchair user who brought a complaint at the domestic and European levels regarding the lack of accessibility of buildings that housed arts and cultural centres run by the municipality where […]
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, […]
June 28, 2021
By Dr Eliza Watt, researcher in cyber law, lecturer in law, Middlesex University, London, UK. On 25 May 2021 the Grand Chamber (GC) of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, the Court) handed down its much-anticipated decision in Big Brother Watch and Others v the UK (Big Brother Watch). The case is of vital […]
June 25, 2021
By Ina Xhepa, lawyer and Executive Director at the European Centre (Albania) Over the last decade, the Albanian judiciary was considered to be one of the weakest aspects of the functioning of the rule of law in the country. Field surveys revealed high levels of corruption and led to the loss of citizen’s trust towards […]
March 29, 2021
By Hakan Kaplankaya, former Turkish diplomat, jurist, INSTITUDE member On 15 December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR/the Court) delivered its first judgment regarding the purge of a public employee as per the first of the notorious emergency legislative decrees adopted by the Turkish government in the aftermath of the controversial coup attempt […]
March 01, 2021
By Liesa Keunen, PhD researcher at Ghent and Antwerp University, Belgium. Liesa Keunen is working on the research project ‘Tax audits on big data: exploring the legitimacy and limits in light of the prohibition of fishing expeditions’ (Ghent & Antwerp University, FWO). She is also a member of the research group Law & Technology, the […]
February 25, 2021
By Sarah Schoentjes, PhD Researcher at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University, and Dr. Pieter Cannoot, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University and Visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp In the case of X and Y v. Romania, the ECtHR has declared one more abusive requirement for gender recognition […]
February 12, 2021
By Dr Dimitrios Kagiaros, Assistant Professor in Public Law and Human Rights, University of Durham In its judgment in Lăcătuş v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) held that fining and imprisoning the applicant for begging amounted to a violation of Article 8 of the Convention. While the judgment raises many important issues […]
February 10, 2021
By Corina Heri, postdoctoral researcher at University of Zürich Begging can be framed in different ways. For city tourism officials, it’s a problem of branding. For local legislatures, it’s an opportunity to show a ‘tough on crime’ stance. For the people who beg themselves, begging can mean survival. But, until recently anyway, the European Court […]
July 13, 2020
Iain Cameron is professor in public international law at Uppsala University Introduction For European states, an important factor pushing towards better regulation of security agencies generally has been the ECHR. The work of “signals intelligence” agencies (collecting metadata and the content of electronic mail and voice communications) came to prominence following the allegations of “mass […]
May 20, 2020
By Jurij Toplak The ECHR’s Article 8 guarantees a right to have data related to criminal procedures reviewed and, after some time and in most cases, removed. In this blog post, I will first summarise the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR or “the Court”) on the retention, review, and removal of […]
May 05, 2020
By Ilia Siatitsa and Ioannis Kouvakas Yesterday, we argued that blanket mobile phone location tracking measures that aim at containing the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be regarded as strictly necessary due to their indiscriminate nature and the existence of less intrusive alternatives with potentially similar effectiveness. In this second blog post, we reflect […]
May 04, 2020
By Ilia Siatitsa and Ioannis Kouvakas In his recent interview on The Intercept, Edward Snowden questioned whether the measures implemented by authorities amid the pandemic are necessary to safeguard people, as well as, whether the pandemic is seen by governments as just another opportunity to make us acquiesce to mass surveillance. In a scramble to […]
March 05, 2020
Judith Vermeulen is a doctoral researcher and a member of the Law & Technology research group, the Human Rights Centre and PIXLES at Ghent University. On January 30, 2020, in the case of Breyer v. Germany, the European Court of Human Rights ruled by six votes to one that the – legally required – indiscriminate […]