22/03/2023 Legal Affairs and Human Rights
There has been an increase in the number of European Court of Human Rights judgments pending before the Committee of Ministers, from 5,231 at the end of 2019 to 6,256 on 1 March 2023, the PACE Legal Affairs Committee warned today. Having seen previous progress on reducing the backlog, it expressed “concern at the current trajectory”.
The committee noted that Ukraine, Romania, Türkiye, Azerbaijan and Hungary have the highest number of non-implemented Court judgments and still face serious structural or complex problems, some of which have not been resolved for over ten years. These five countries, and in addition Russia, account for over seventy per cent of cases where implementation is pending.
Unanimously adopting a draft resolution on the implementation of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, based on a report by Constantinos Efstathiou (Cyprus, SOC), the committee expressed concern at the delays in implementing the Court's judgments and recalled that the legal obligation for States Parties to the Convention to implement the Court’s judgments is “binding on all branches of State authority” and cannot be avoided through the invocation of technical problems or obstacles which are due, in particular, to the lack of political will, lack of resources or national legislation, including the Constitution.
The parliamentarians recalled that where a State’s legislation, including its Constitution, gives rise to violations of the Convention, “it is incumbent on that State to interpret and, where necessary, amend its legislation in such a way as to resolve the violations found by the ECtHR and avoid any repetition”.
Finally, the committee expressed grave concerned at the slow progress towards the implementation of the Court’s judgments delivered in inter-States cases or cases showing inter-State features. It called on all States Parties to the Convention involved in the process of implementation of such judgments to fully co-operate with the Committee of Ministers, and called on Member States, as well as instances of the Council of Europe, “to consider employing innovative and creative techniques and measures to seek to make progress in addressing intractable problems in such cases”.