December 06, 2011
In a decision of 28 June (COHRE v. France, no. 63/2010), which was only recently made public, the European Committee of Social Rights has found the French zero tolerance policy towards East European Roma living in illegal camps to be in violation of the European Social Charter. The case, which was lodged by the NGO […]
December 02, 2011
This guest post is co-authored by Rónán Ó Fathaigh and Chris Wiersma, two colleagues from the Human Rights Centre. More information on Rónán and Chris can be found on the website of the Center for Journalism Studies of Ghent University, here In its recent Akçam v. Turkey judgment, the Second Section of the European Court […]
October 03, 2011
By Ingrid Leijten. Ingrid Leijten works as a Ph.D. fellow and teaching assistant at the Leiden University Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. Her research interest lies in the development of the ECHR and the practice of the ECtHR in relation to the Member States’ policymaking. Stummer v. Austria deals with the […]
August 03, 2011
Dear Readers, The Court is going on recess in August and so are we until the end of the month. We wish you all a nice summer and look forward to being back soon with more comments on the European Court’s latest developments. The Strasbourg Observers
April 26, 2011
Dear blog visitor, This month, it is a year ago that the blog gave birth to its first posts. 102 posts later, here we are! When we started this blog, we could only dream of the current results. 32,407 views in 2010 and already 22,504 for the first part of 2011. While in 2010 we […]
April 15, 2011
By Laurens Lavrysen* In the recent case of Rahimi v. Greece, the European Court of Human Rights had to rule over the detention and the lack of care of a 15 year old Afghan unaccompanied minor. At arrival in Greece, he was placed in detention for two days, after which he was abandoned to live […]
March 08, 2011
By Dirk Voorhoof, Ghent University / Legal-Human-Academy* On March 3, 2011, the Tribunal de Grand Instance de Paris issued its decision in a case that has alarmed journal editors and reviewers, being afraid it could have a chilling effect on scholars’ and editors’ willingness to publish book reviews. The case concerns the criminal libel case […]
February 24, 2011
By Laurens Lavrysen* As Lourdes explained in her blog post, “any attempt to comment exhaustively on the recent landmark ruling of the Grand Chamber in M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece in one page would be bound to fail.” This post will therefore focus on the impact of this judgment on EU Asylum Law, in particular […]
January 10, 2011
On February 3 and 4, you can meet us in Strasbourg where we organize the conference: “Mainstreaming Diversity: Rewriting Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights” The conference wants to suggest ways in which the European Court of Human Rights might improve its mainstreaming of diversity concerns. The conference is organized in six panels, respectively […]
December 22, 2010
This post has been written by Laurens Lavrysen, one of our colleagues at the Human Rights Centre. In P.V. v. Spain (no. 35159/09), the European Court of Human Rights Court had to rule over an application by a male-to-female transsexual with regard to restrictions imposed on the contact arrangements with her son. Invoking Article 8 […]
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. […]
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 16, 2010
This guestblog is written by professor dr. Dirk Voorhoof*. On 14 September 2010 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights overruled an earlier finding by the Third Section Chamber in a case regarding the protection of journalistic sources. The judgment of 14 September 2010 puts the jurisprudence of the European Court back […]
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 […]