European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights is a supranational court of law hearing cases of human rights violations. The provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights set its operations. The Court is based in Strasbourg, France. Any of the forty-six member states in the convention can petition the Court for matters of advisory opinion and adjudication. Judges are appointed to a single nine-year term after their election by majority vote of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Individuals and governments can bring cases before the Court against states, organizations, or individuals accusing them of human rights violations. Proceedings are public, and rulings are made based on admissibility and merits. The Court became permanently open full-time, replacing the European Commission of Human Rights. The Court is beset with problems limiting its caseload completions because of language differences, inadequate staffing, and too few multilingual judges trained in human rights.

Background

During World War II, the German and Austrian Nazis (and their allies in neighboring and conquered countries) exterminated eleven million men, women, and children—specifically targeting six million Jews. This Holocaust was of unprecedented size and organization. The mass murder of so many civilians shocked the victorious Allies. They held Nazis individually responsible, putting them on trial for decades after the war for crimes against humanity. The hope was never again will man commit such horrific acts, or, at the very least, will the world let perpetrators go unpunished. In 1950, the European Convention on Human Rights opened and came into force in 1953, making the Universal Declaration of Human Rights binding on member states. The European Court of Human Rights opened its doors six years later, putting on trial violators of the right to life, fair hearings, right for private and family life, freedoms of expression, thought, conscience, and religion, and the protection of property. Torture is prohibited, as are inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, slavery, discrimination, forced labor, arbitrary and unlawful detention, and forced labor.

Individual victims have been able to file complaints since reforms were instituted in 1998. Complaints are lodged to the Court largely to address civil and political rights violations; then, they are assigned for investigation to rapporteurs to oversee the cases and make recommendations to judges, who dismiss or hold the accused for trial.

The International Criminal Court tries individuals violating standards from the European Court of Human Rights. The latter exerts more influence over international human rights bodies and domestic and international organizations interpreting human rights standards, fair trials, and legal order. The European Court of Human Rights has issued judgments, for example, establishing a thirty-year-long jurisprudence on Holocaust denial and principles of free speech. The Court has addressed nations’ interpretation of religious freedom in cases of hijabs and other head coverings worn by Muslim women and the display of crucifixes in Italian school classrooms. The Court’s panoptic commitment to practical and effective balancing of judicial creativity and respect for the changing ethical standards of member states in setting the scope of rights established by the European Convention on Human Rights is its primary strength.

European Court of Human Rights Today

The Court has nothing to do with, nor any role in, the European Union—not to be confused with the Council of Europe that oversees the Court. The Court maintains jurisdiction over the seven hundred million people living in the forty-six member states (forty-seven states until Russia was suspended in 2022). Religious diversity is a core issue because of the deeply rooted Christian faith.

The European Court of Human Rights' official languages are English and French, but member states can also submit cases in the national language of the member state submitting the case. In these cases, the Court provides simultaneous interpretation in English and French during hearings. In the 2010s, some concerns arose concerning the Court's lack of enough judges to hear all the petitions and the lack of adequate knowledge of human rights concepts and principles among some judges. This lack of knowledge could result in biased or inaccurate judgments, and the lack of judges causes the Court to work very slowly. Other concerns about the Court included a flawed selection process, lack of proper judicial selection criteria, the over-reliance by some judges on recommendations by investigators and rapporteurs about judicial actions on cases they investigate, and, at times, a lack of diligence in reports and reporting to judges resulting in inaccurate decisions. The European Convention on Human Rights requires that elected judges meet the criteria for high judicial office positions or be jurisconsults of recognized competence, but many argue this does not ensure that judges are experts in the nuances and complexities of human rights laws. To improve efficiency and accuracy, in 2022, the Steering Committee for Human Rights required the Court to revise and improve its selection criteria for judges. However, in 2024, the Judicial Appointments Commission had to repeat its search for a UK judge because of the low quality of the applicants.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Court ruled in favor of the right of a newspaper to report on the thalidomide medicinal scandal causing congenital abnormalities (The Sunday Times v. United Kingdom [1979]); it ruled against Ireland’s ban on homosexuality, upholding the right of private and family life (Norris v. Ireland [1988]); it ruled against governments storing DNA and fingerprints of innocent people (S and Marper v. United Kingdom [2008]); and against the United Kingdom charging immigrants a fee for not marrying in the Church of England (O'Donoghue and Others v. the United Kingdom [2010]). The Court became increasingly sensitive to the Christian majority’s religious sensibilities in cases brought before it, and judges expanded their interpretations of human rights. The Court began leaning toward institutional secularism in cases of religious freedom and church-state relations. Some observers suggested that the Court was institutionalizing the secularist positions in cases regarding the policies of Turkey and France. The Court protected secular Kemalists against fundamentalist Islamic policies in Şahin v. Turkey (2004) and Dahlab v. Switzerland (2001). The Court links democracy and pluralism through rulings on freedom of speech and association.

The situation of migrants was among the most tenacious cases appearing before the European Court of Human Rights in the 2010s. Legal versus illegal entry, labor migrants, family migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are measures the Court considers in evaluating claims against states’ laws and actions. The quantity of migrants—even to the point of overwhelming government resources—is of little concern to the Court. It is obliged to rule in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights standards. In 2011, the Court ruled against Italy for keeping three Tunisian men in degrading conditions with appalling hygiene conditions, depriving them of liberty by forbidding them to leave the "reception center" (Khlaifa and Others v. Italy). Italy also violated their freedom by refusing to consider their requests for asylum before repatriating them to Tunisia. The Court also found—despite the mass migration of people from states where wars rage—that collective expulsions expose countries to claims of human rights violations. The Court ordered Italy to pay financial compensation to the Tunisians, thus opening a punishment for countries violating individuals’ human rights. Belgium and Greece were fined under a similar ruling in 2011 for actions taken against asylum seekers.

In 2021, the Court ruled that the Czech Republic's vaccine mandate for children did not violate human rights in Vavřička and Others v. the Czech Republic (2021). The Court issued its first judgment concerning the obligations of member states to actively prevent and reverse climate change in 2024. The Court ruled in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v Switzerland (2024) that the country had violated the EU Convention on Human Rights by failing to follow climate change guidelines.

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