Last month, the Legal Affairs Committee of Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) discussed the newest report on implementation of the European Court’s judgments. This 9th report was made by Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’ and, as always, is a valuable resource to get insight into the many problems in giving follow-up to the judgments of the Court. The number of judgments pending at the Committee of Ministers has now almost reached 10,000. More worrying than that is that there is an increase in the number of leading cases, in which states are really required to do something new to remedy a situation and usually change their laws or policies structurally, that have not yet been implemented for more than five years. Here, it clearly is not only about lack of capacity within national jurisdictions or slow procedures of amending legislation, but also about political unwillingness. As the Committee noted, it does not stop there. There also are “attempts made to undermine the Court’s authority and the Convention-based human rights protection system.”
As in earlier years, a relatively small number of states causes most problems in this respect. This time – and close observers may not be surprised – Italy, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova and Poland are the main problematic countries.
The appendix to the report give a detailed overview of where matters stand in relation to a number of leading cases in a large number of countries.
