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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
.