Who really needs reform: Court or Committee of Ministers? HFHR’s letter to Danish Ministry of Justice

The Helsinki Foundation has sent a letter to the Danish Ministry of Justice as Denmark has taken the Presidency of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
The HFHR offers its comments in relation to the agenda of a conference of experts, “2019 and Beyond – Taking Stock and Moving Forward from the Interlaken Process”, which is scheduled to take place form 22 to 24 of November. The Foundation expresses its concerns over the fact that the event focuses on a reform of the European Court of Human Rights. Even though the pace of proceedings before the ECtHR is still slow, the Court has substantially limited the number of pending cases. Given the above, a proposal of another reform seems to be far from an optimum solution to the problem.

The HFHR emphasises that discussions should focus on a reform of the framework for supervising the execution of ECtHR judgments, which is a job of the Committee of Ministers. The Committee has recorded a staggering backlog of 10,000 unexamined cases. This is extremely important in the context of a big surge in the number of applications submitted to the ECtHR in 2017 (in particular from Turkey), which only raise the volume of cases supervised by the Committee in the years to come.

The full letter is available for reading here.