Paul and Cat take a break from taking NL
Special lecture, Justice Egbert Myjer
I don’t know what we did this day. All I know was that I was three minutes late to a guest speaker hosted by my Human Rights and Criminal Law class. The speaker was one of the judges of the European Court on Human Rights in Strasbourg!!!
The first part of the lecture concerned the current state of the ECHR: “in crisis.” Because the standard for applying for your case to be heard by the ECHR is so low, the Court is flooded with cases to review and try. Inefficiency also exists at the procedural level, often requiring many judges to sit for each case, whereas the case docket would dwindle if some cases could be overseen by just one judge. Why don’t they just improve their operations? According to the Judge, that is due to yet another procedural shortcoming of the ECHR – the process can only be changed by unanimous agreement of all the contracting states of the Convention.
The requirements to apply to the ECHR include filling out an application form and submitting the documents subsequently requested by the Court within the appropriate time limitation. That’s it. You don’t need a lawyer, you don’t need to have these documents in any particular language, and you may fax or mail your plea to the Court. Of course, the low threshold is great for equal access to the Court. But it is undoubtedly a major contributor to the fact that the ECHR is experiencing a backlog of 55,000 cases at the moment. The Judge stated that 90-95% of the applications are deemed unmeritorious and rejected. In 2008, about 1700 of 30,000 applications were heard by the Court. It doesn’t help that the Court has only 600 employees, including administration and attorneys. There are 47 judges, each with two full-time attorneys, two part-time attorneys, and one judge-in-training.
There’s a lot more about this captivating lecture, but I won’t bore you with it. For more info you can visit http://www.echr.coe.int/, and even view the cases and watch webcasts of hearings by clicking on HUDOC.
I don’t know what we did this day. All I know was that I was three minutes late to a guest speaker hosted by my Human Rights and Criminal Law class. The speaker was one of the judges of the European Court on Human Rights in Strasbourg!!!
The first part of the lecture concerned the current state of the ECHR: “in crisis.” Because the standard for applying for your case to be heard by the ECHR is so low, the Court is flooded with cases to review and try. Inefficiency also exists at the procedural level, often requiring many judges to sit for each case, whereas the case docket would dwindle if some cases could be overseen by just one judge. Why don’t they just improve their operations? According to the Judge, that is due to yet another procedural shortcoming of the ECHR – the process can only be changed by unanimous agreement of all the contracting states of the Convention.
The requirements to apply to the ECHR include filling out an application form and submitting the documents subsequently requested by the Court within the appropriate time limitation. That’s it. You don’t need a lawyer, you don’t need to have these documents in any particular language, and you may fax or mail your plea to the Court. Of course, the low threshold is great for equal access to the Court. But it is undoubtedly a major contributor to the fact that the ECHR is experiencing a backlog of 55,000 cases at the moment. The Judge stated that 90-95% of the applications are deemed unmeritorious and rejected. In 2008, about 1700 of 30,000 applications were heard by the Court. It doesn’t help that the Court has only 600 employees, including administration and attorneys. There are 47 judges, each with two full-time attorneys, two part-time attorneys, and one judge-in-training.
There’s a lot more about this captivating lecture, but I won’t bore you with it. For more info you can visit http://www.echr.coe.int/, and even view the cases and watch webcasts of hearings by clicking on HUDOC.
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