CYIL Vol. 7, 2016

CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ THE CZECH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS … THE CZECH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN 2015

Vít Alexander Schorm*

Introduction Since the previous edition of the Czech Yearbook of International Law, this annual contribution aims at providing a short 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 respective previous year – 2015 in these circumstances. My last article ended by saying, amongst other remarks, that “there will hopefully be a matter for contribution to this Yearbook next year as well”. In reality, this is hardly so, as the year of reference was particularly poor in new judgments and nearly all interesting cases are still pending at the time of the writing this article (i.e. in August 2016). It is certainly not up to the Agent of the Government of the country concerned to comment on the reasons explaining why the Court has slowed down significantly its pace of deciding on applications filed against that country. Let me also recall the introduction to my last article in the sense that the fate of many applications is for them to be declared inadmissible by a single judge (around 400 cases against the Czech Republic ended this way in 2015) and that one year is not a very representative unit. A standard number of some 45 new applications were communicated to the Czech Government in 2015. The year of reference, for a second time in a row, does not seem to be a very typical “vintage”, at least when it comes to judgments (only 2 on the merits and 2 on just satisfaction after a friendly settlement) and even decisions (10) delivered in communicated cases. As a whole, when it comes to the year 2015 three cases are worth mentioning, very different in their nature and Convention provisions invoked, but with some common features in procedural terms. The Court has dealt with them in two steps: after a Chamber judgment which did not establish a violation of the Convention, the panel of five judges granted the applicant’s request for referral of the respective case to the Grand Chamber, with subsequent fresh assessment by seventeen judges of the Court. Each of the cases has found itself at a different stage of re-examination. * Vít Alexander Schorm has been the Agent of the Government of the Czech Republic before the European Court of Human Rights since 2002. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in Brno in 1996, studied public comparative law at the Université de Paris I – Panthéon- Sorbonne (D.E.A. in 1998) and is an alumnus of the French École nationale d’administration (2002). All views expressed in this article are strictly personal, and should not be construed as reflecting the opinion of the Czech Government.

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