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1/ Annual figures from European Court of Human Rights show again that the UK is hardly on the Court's radar. A tiny proportion of the applications heard and even tinier proportion succeeded.
What does it all mean?
What does it all mean?
2/ Here are the headline figures:
🔸42,716 applications decided
🔹1,014 judgments (so around 41k struck out)
🔸UK found to be in violation only *twice*
🔹Russia in violation 248 times by comparison
echr.coe.int/Documents/Annu…
🔸42,716 applications decided
🔹1,014 judgments (so around 41k struck out)
🔸UK found to be in violation only *twice*
🔹Russia in violation 248 times by comparison
echr.coe.int/Documents/Annu…
3/ Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Romania have a huge amount of pending cases against them - Russia has 11,750, which is over 20% of the total (there are 47 states signed up to the Convention)
UK has 124 pending cases.
UK has 124 pending cases.
4/ Another interesting stat is the most number of violations across the Convention system is of Article 6, the right to a fair trial (24%). This is consistent with the history of the Convention - see @rights_info's infographic on all cases from 1959-2014 rightsinfo.org/infographics/h…
5/ The number of cases against the UK has always been comparatively minuscule (compared to e.g. Russia, Turkey, Romania), but the number of violations against the UK has gone down from around 10 per year in e.g. 2010 to almost none
5/ Having said that, there were some interesting and important cases involving the UK in 2018 - e.g. Big Brother Watch v UK (rightsinfo.org/breaking-gover…) and Ireland v UK (strasbourgobservers.com/2018/04/25/ire…)
6/ All in all, the UK is a comparative 'good human rights citizen'. The Court is even more respectful now of the UK Supreme Court and will very rarely go against it, and in fact regularly has 'dialogue' with it. Which is how an international court should work
7/ The caricature of the Court as unduly interfering was always wrong - once Abu Qatada and prisoner votes cases were concluded (Abu Qatada was sent back to Jordan with his human rights intact and the UK has given a few prisoners the vote) it has been very cautious in UK cases
8/ The very low figures perhaps show that the Court has been too respectful in recent years. Hopefully the Catt case (judgment against the UK last week) shows it getting its mojo back a little
9/ Brexit has sucked up most of the anti-European airtime in the UK for the past couple of years. If there is a 'bad' Brexit outcome for the anti-Europeans, expect to see the ECHR back in the firing line
10/ 🙃
