Can the European Court of Human Rights continue to play a meaningful role in the protection and development of human rights across the full range ...

2. Other developments and steps to overcome the crisis

Reforms aside, the Committee of Ministers continuously acknowledged the need to improve the protection of human rights by the help of the ECtHR. Shortly after Protocol 14 the Committee of Ministers of the CoE recalled „its mission to take measures in order to guarantee the long-term effectiveness of the control system instituted by the Convention (Council of Europe 2004)“. In this section some of the steps taken as well as issues that remain problematic will be highlighted.

Let us start with a more general debate about both nature and purpose of the European human rights system: As the overload of applications still poses one of the main problems a mechanism was introduced in order to avoid the so far established case-by-case approach and instead let pilot judgments handle repetitive cases, thus conceiving of the Court as a constitutional court. In doing so the Court avoids the backlog of thousands of cases which can actually all be traced back to one and the same structural problem and instead singles out selected cases (Buyse 2009). The main objective is to reduce the Court’s workload, firstly by directly demanding resolution of all comparable cases in the respondent state and secondly indirectly as this will eventually lead to national reform (O’Boyle, 2011). What is more is that by concentrating on pilot judgments it supposedly can enunciate general principles of human rights law, arguing that it is the Courts main role to be a European standard setter, „constitutionalizing the human rights protection under its jurisdiction (Oppedal 2011: 94)“. Prof. Rick Lawson gets to the heart of the debate when he advocates for the constitutional court’ camp, claiming that „the Court...

... middle of paper ...

... Pilot Judgement Procedure addressing Systemic Human Rights Issues, University of Bergen, Department of Comparative Politics, Master Thesis

O’Boyle, Michael (2011) ‘The Future of the European Court of Human Rights’, German Law Journal, 12, 10, pp. 1862-1877.

Pavone, Tommaso (2012) The Past and Future Relationship of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights: A Functional Analysis, University of Chicago

Rainey, Bernadette (2012) Human Rights Law, Oxford, Oxford University Press, ch. 2, pp. 20-37.

Sepúlveda, M. et al (2004) Human Rights Reference Handbook, Costa Rica, University of Peace, part II, Ch. 2 ‘The Council of Europe’, pp. 125-144.

Stone Sweet, Alec and Helen Keller (2008) ‘Assessing the Impact of the ECHR on National Legal Systems’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 33. Accessed under: http://works.bepress.com/alec_stone_sweet/32