July 01, 2020
Earlier this week, we received the sad news that Paula Marckx passed away at the age of 94. Having lived a remarkable life as, amongst others, a journalist, model, pilot and entrepreneur, she will be remembered, first and foremost, for the case that bears her name in Strasbourg. Her death, little over a year after […]
June 29, 2020
By Cedric Ryngaert and Kushtrim Istrefi On 26 May 2020, the European Court of Human Rights rendered a chamber judgment in Makuchyan and Minasyan v. Azerbaijan and Hungary. The case concerns a soldier from Azerbaijan, R.S., who killed an Armenian soldier and attempted to kill another one while on a NATO training in Budapest. R.S. […]
June 26, 2020
By Giulio Fedele (University of Rome “La Sapienza”, giulio.fedele@uniroma1.it) Hate-speech against sexual minorities has become a pressing issue for the ECHR. Online media and social platforms boosted the possibilities one has to express both personal opinions and hateful comments, thus making it harder for the Strasbourg Court to draw the line of the protection afforded […]
June 16, 2020
By Dragoș Călin In the recent judgment in the case Kövesi v. Romania (application no. 3594/19) the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 6 § 1 (right to a fair trial) and Article 10 (right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights […]
June 11, 2020
By Alice Margaria (Research Fellow, Department of ‘Law & Anthropology’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Fathers who want to be or remain involved in their children’s lives have become frequent applicants before the ECtHR. Underlying many of their complaints are national measures reflecting a ‘conventional’ understanding of fatherhood, where paternal care is attached scant […]
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 07, 2020
By Moritz Baumgärtel M.N. and others v. Belgium confronted the ECtHR with the question whether Article 3 of the ECHR places an obligation on State Parties to provide short-term humanitarian visas in their foreign embassies and consulates to potential asylum seekers. The Court, assembled in its Grand Chamber, found the case to be outside the […]
May 06, 2020
By Francesco Luigi Gatta, Research Fellow, UCLouvain, member of EDEM (Equipe droits européens et migrations) On 24 March 2020, the ECtHR delivered its judgment in Asady and Others v. Slovakia, which concerned the expulsion to Ukraine of a group of Afghan nationals. With a controversial ruling (passed by a slight majority of 4 votes to […]
April 30, 2020
In February, not long before we all went in lockdown, I attended an event with civil society organisations in Brussels concerning litigation and advocacy strategies. One of the organizers approached me as she recognized my name from the Strasbourg Observers blog and she explained how the series we published on the case of S.A.S. v. […]
April 27, 2020
By Ronan Ó Fathaigh and Dirk Voorhoof On 26 March 2020, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that a refusal by the Ukrainian authorities to give a non-governmental organisation (NGO) access to information about the education and work history of top politicians as contained in their official CVs, filed as candidates for Parliament, […]
April 23, 2020
By Marie-Bénédicte Dembour Have the Strasbourg Observers really been running only for ten years? On receiving the invitation to celebrate this anniversary, my mind travelled back to the time before your emergence, and I felt rather isolated in my critical approach to the study of the European Court of Human Rights. Long before I joined […]
April 22, 2020
Lourdes Peroni, Lecturer in Human Rights, Sheffield Hallam University, UK I am thrilled to be part of this Blog Symposium to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Strasbourg Observers with some reflections on the memorable Grand Chamber judgment in Paposhvili v. Belgium. In December 2016, amidst a growing number of dissenting voices pushing for change […]
April 15, 2020
By Stijn Smet, Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at Hasselt University I was sitting on the grass outside a classroom at the University of Vienna when I first understood why notions like control, power(lessness) and vulnerability are central to the interpretation of the absolute prohibition of torture. It was a warm and sunny day in […]
April 10, 2020
Dirk Voorhoof (Human Rights Centre, Ghent University and Legal Human Academy) On 18 June 2015, Strasbourg Observers published our blog post ‘Delfi AS v. Estonia: Grand Chamber confirms liability of online news portal for offensive comments posted by its readers’. It situated and commented the Grand Chamber judgment of 16 June 2015 in the first case […]
March 26, 2020
By Hanaa Hakiki On 13 February 2020, the Court published its long awaited Grand Chamber judgment in the case of N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, the first case addressing the Spanish policy of immediate expulsions at the Ceuta and Melilla enclaves. In a speech the Court’s president had announced that the judgment would be “instrumental […]
March 23, 2020
By Dirk Voorhoof and Ronan Ó Fathaigh In the case of Studio Monitori and Others v. Georgia the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in its judgment of 30 January 2020 has confirmed that the right to freedom of expression and information as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) […]
March 11, 2020
By Fleur van Leeuwen (Boğaziçi University) ‘The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men.’ It is a quote from Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman in an article on domestic violence in the Guardian last weekend. The […]
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 […]
February 27, 2020
Dr. Gamze Erdem Türkelli is a Post-Doctoral Fellow Fundamental Research of Research Foundation (FWO) Flanders (File Number 12Q1719N) at the Law and Development Research Group, University of Antwerp Faculty of Law. The NGO Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Skopje (HCHR) brought a case before the ECtHR on behalf of L.R., an eight-year-old child with […]
February 25, 2020
By Ruben Wissing (Ghent University) On 13 February, the Grand Chamber rendered a long awaited judgment, meandering over more than one hundred pages, in the N.D. and N.T case on the push-back practices against migrants at the Moroccan-Spanish border fence surrounding the city of Melilla – the so-called devoluciones en caliente or ‘hot returns’ by […]