March 06, 2013
In this second post on the Grand Chamber judgment in X. and Others v. Austria, I will focus on the narrowness of it all: the narrowness of the issue before the Court, the narrowness of the ruling and the narrow approach the majority took to the European consensus. Although I believe the majority should be […]
March 04, 2013
This guest post – the first in a two-post series on X. and Others v. Austria – was written by Grégor Puppinck* On the 19th of February, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights published its ruling in the case of X and others v. Austria (no. 19010/07), which decided by ten […]
February 27, 2013
It looks like freedom-of-religion season has arrived in Strasbourg. After leaving aside the “freedom to resign” doctrine in Eweida, the Court has just made another move towards greater recognition of the importance of freedom of religion. In Vojnity v. Hungary, the Court clearly recognizes religion as a “suspect” ground of differentiation. As a result – […]
February 19, 2013
This guest post was written by Elaine Webster. Elaine holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a lecturer and director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights Law at the University of Strathclyde. In S.H.H. v. United Kingdom a chamber of the ECtHR, by four votes to three, found […]
February 06, 2013
The Strasbourg Court has once more delivered a judgment in a Roma school segregation case. The applicants in Horváth and Kiss v. Hungary are two young Roma men, who were diagnosed as having mild mental disabilities when they were children. As a result of these diagnoses, they were placed in a remedial school. Their education […]
January 23, 2013
In this second post on Eweida and Others v. the United Kingdom, I deal with the conflict between freedom of religion (or the prohibition of indirect discrimination on the basis of religion, if you so wish) and the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (or an employer’s interest in upholding equality and […]
January 17, 2013
Eweida and Others v. the United Kingdom is probably one of the most awaited freedom of religion judgments of recent times. Twelve third parties intervened in the case. The judgment in fact covers four big cases brought by Christian applicants, complaining that they had suffered religious discrimination at work. This week and next week, the […]
January 10, 2013
This guest post was written by Mila Isakovska. Mila holds an LLM in International Public Law and Human Rights from the Riga Graduate School of Law and is currently working as Legal System Monitor in the OSCE Mission in Kosovo. The news of the Grand Chamber judgment in the extraordinary rendition case of El Masri […]
November 20, 2012
Amongst all the rightful concerns about the Strasbourg Court’s case-overload, I often find myself wondering about the cases that the Court isn’t getting. Some structurally occurring human rights violations aren’t receiving the attention of the Court – at least not in any amount that is proportionate to their scale. Domestic violence against women is one […]
November 07, 2012
This post is written by Dirk Voorhoof* The European Court of Human Rights delivered a new and remarkable judgment on trade union freedom of expression. In Szima v. Hungary the European Court concluded that a criminal conviction of a leader of a police trade union for having posted critical and offensive comments on the Union’s […]
November 05, 2012
The Strasbourg Observers are delighted to publish this guest post by Johanna Westeson, Regional Director for Europe, Center for Reproductive Rights. The Center for Reproductive Rights represented the applicants in P and S v. Poland before the ECtHR; see the Center’s press release here. This week, the European Court of Human Rights issued its decision […]
October 25, 2012
A few weeks ago, the European Court of Human Rights released its judgment in X. v. Turkey. The case concerned a homosexual detainee who was put in an individual cell and under a very restrictive detention regime, after he complained about intimidation and harassment by heterosexual detainees with whom he shared a collective cell. On […]
October 09, 2012
It’s fair to say that the Court’s record on racial discrimination is hesitant. Only as late as 2004 did the Court for the first time find that a State was guilty of racial discrimination.[1] This was in the Chamber judgment of Nachova v Bulgaria, which was later partly rescinded by the Grand Chamber in 2005. […]
October 03, 2012
Is the roof of the house in which you own a flat leaking? Is there a delay in repairs? Do you have to repaint the walls? Is there a delay of enforcement of decisions that ordered the repairs? These now seem to be valid questions for your potential human rights violation. In the case of […]
September 27, 2012
Earlier this week, the European Court of Human Rights released its judgment in El Haski v. Belgium, a case on the admissibility at a criminal trial of evidence potentially obtained through ill-treatment of third persons in a third State (Morocco). The ECtHR ruled that the Belgian authorities should have excluded the evidence from the trial. […]
September 20, 2012
This guest post was written by Adriana Di Stefano. Adriana is a tenured researcher and lecturer in international law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Catania. Her areas of expertise include international humanitarian law, human rights law and EU Law. On August 28th, 2012 the Second Section of the European Court of […]
August 14, 2012
According to HUDOC, Judge Tulkens sat on the panel of 1843 ECtHR judgments, amongst which 217 Grand Chamber judgments. The same source lists as her oldest judgment the article 6 case of Van Pelt v. France on 23 May 2000. As HUDOC – however wonderful – has its imperfections, we cannot know for certain whether […]
July 31, 2012
This guest post was written by Gabrielle Guillemin* and is a re-blog from Inforrm’s Blog (original post here). Earlier this month, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights handed down judgment in Mouvement Raelien Suisse v Switzerland (Application no.16354/06). The case concerned the Swiss authorities’ refusal to allow a billboard campaign […]
July 23, 2012
The ECtHR has brought a turbulent Dutch legal saga to a close. In the highly interesting Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij v. the Netherlands, the Court has declared the complaint by the Dutch political party ‘SGP’ inadmissible. The SGP is, in the words of the Court, “a confessional political party firmly rooted in historical Dutch Reformed Protestantism” […]
July 12, 2012
This guest post was written by Ingrid Leijten, Ph.D. researcher and teaching assistant at the Leiden University Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. On 26 June 2012 the Grand Chamber delivered its judgment in the case of Herrmann v. Germany. It found a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 concerning […]