The Court has finalized the translation of the applicant pages on its website. The information on how to apply is now available in all the official languages of the state parties to the Convention, ranging from Albanian to Ukrainian, and from Catalan to Estonian. For each language, the pages contain practical information on how to lodge a complaint, on admissibility criteria, and the Convention text. Even some of the explanatory videos have been translated. Paradoxically, this ever-increasing accessibility in practical terms may not bode well for the caseload of the Court. It is therefore encouraging, that the Court also noted earlier this week that great progress has been made in reducing that backlog. In fact, it backlog has decreased from 151,6000 in early 2012 to 84,850 at the end of June of this year. This amounts to a 44% decrease, no mean feat to say the least, even if we consider that the single judge mechanism responsible in combination with new working methods for most of this have been able to do so by dealing with the relatively more straight-forward cases. Although the amounts are still high, the trend for the past two years has at least been going in the right direction.
