Enforcement of ECtHR judgements: Poland is lagging behind

At the end of September, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution listing Poland as one of the countries that have the biggest problems implementing judgements of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Poland was listed along with Turkey, Ukraine and Russia, among others.

This is the third resolution (the other two were passed in 2011 and 2013) that draws attention to the lack of swift and proper response in our country to the judgements of Strasbourg Court regarding violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

HFHR has alerted to that issue on numerous occasions. After the first resolution of that type which was passed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2011, the HFHR called on Ewa Kopacz, the Speaker of the Sejm at that time, to take measures in order to ensure that the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights be implemented in a swift and proper way.

Despite the positive changes as to the implementation of the European Court of Human Rights judgements which recently led to the closure of a number of control procedures before the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, “the fact that Poland was mentioned in yet another resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly shows that the progress was insufficient, and that it is not that easy to make up for years of backlog”, reads the HFHR’s statement.

The Parliamentary Assembly called on the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers to make use of the new legal procedure, whereby the Committee of Ministers may bring infringement proceedings to the European Court of Human Rights against a state that delays the implementation of a judgement. “It would be bad if Poland was to be found among the states covered by the new infringement procedure in the future”, the statement emphasises.