CYIL 2015

VÍT ALEXANDER SCHORM

CYIL 6 ȍ2015Ȏ

Introduction This contribution aims at providing an overview of the European Court of Human Rights’ activities with regard to the Czech Republic as a high contracting party to the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”) in the year 2014. A couple of remarks are needed before we turn to the usual substance of articles of this kind, mainly devoted to a description and analysis of the case law of the Strasbourg Court (“the Court”). First, one must bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of applications lodged with the Court under Article 34 become totally irrelevant, for they are declared inadmissible by a single judge “without further examination” under Article 27 § 1 of the Convention. Decisions are not written en bonne et due forme and no precise reasoning is provided to the applicant and even less so to the public at large via HUDOC. 1 This was the fate of some 730 applications against the Czech Republic in 2014. Only a small minority of cases are usually communicated to a government for observations; this number was 12 with respect to the Czech Republic. Second, the representativeness of a single year in the identification of issues a particular contracting State has under the Convention or in the development of the case law, apart from the applicants’ capacity to file admissible applications and raise relevant issues, which is already a haphazard factor, is further diminished by another such factor, namely the Court’s judicial policy. Although it is governed by the Court’s categorisation of cases according to their importance for the applicants and the development of the case law, 2 it must as a minimum be admitted that a case can move from one category to another and thus the degree of urgency initially assigned to an application can later be changed. In other words, a single year can hardly be regarded as representative, but a unit of time is a legitimate organization tool if we are to start a chronicle, and provided, of course, that we are aware of the above caveats. If we were to replace the year 2014 in the context of an aggregate of the years since the creation of the Czech Republic as an independent State in 1993, taking into account the evolution of the issues examined by the Court, we could easily see that 2014 was not a very typical “vintage”, at least when it comes to judgments delivered in communicated cases the majority of which over time unsurprisingly concerned the right to a fair trial. 3 1 Database of the Court’s case law. 2 The Court’s priority policy is published on its webpage. There are seven categories: I. urgent applications, II. applications raising questions capable of having impact on the effectiveness of the Convention system or an important question of general interest, III. applications which on their face raise as main complaints issues under Articles 2, 3, 4 and 5 § 1 of the Convention, IV. potentially well-founded applications based on other provisions, V. applications raising issues already dealt with in a pilot/leading judgment, VI. applications giving rise to a problem of admissibility, VII. applications manifestly inadmissible. 3 For a statistical overview, see Annual Report 2014 of the European Court of Human Rights , Council of Europe, 2015, pp. 165 et seq .

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