Which countries get hit by judgments from the European court of human rights?
It matters because the role of the court - which is not part of the European Union, contrary to popular belief (that's the European court of justice you're thinking of) - has always been a political issue. Only this week, Prime Minister David Cameron called for the court to back off the UK.
the prime minister accused the European court of human rights of having a "corrosive effect" on people's support for civil liberties, the head of the Council of Europe criticised British plans to streamline its work … Britain is proposing a "sunset clause" which would lead to cases being "automatically struck" off after a set period, between one to two years, if they remain unresolved
Well, the annual report of the ECHR shows which country most commonly falls foul of the ECHR. And it's not the UK.
The European court of human rights was set up in Strasbourg by the Council of Europe member states in 1959 to deal with violations of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. The data shows that:
• The court ruled against the United Kingdom on eight occasions in 2011, compared with 159 violations found against Turkey, 121 against Russia and 105 against Ukraine
• Of Western European nations, Greece and Italy had the largest number of adverse rulings, at 69 and 32 respectively
• The human rights violations most frequently found by the court were in the length of proceedings (341), the right to liberty and security (241) and the right to fair trial (211)
• The court found 70 instances in which the right to life had been improperly violated – 53 of which were found against Russia
• Russia also had the most rulings against it for inhuman or degrading treatment, at 62 of 183, and with a total of 488 was the country with the most human rights violations in 2011
• The ECHR handed out judgment on 1,157 cases over the course of 2011, of which 19 related to the UK. Of these, the court found against UK had violated at least one human right on eight occasions. Nine of the remaining cases were found not to have violated human rights law, while two cases were "friendly settlements"
• The UK was found against for lack of effective investigation on five occasions, not to have offered a fair trial on three occasions, and to have failed its duty on prohibition of torture twice
The majority of cases brought to the court are struck out as inadmissible without receiving a full hearing. In the UK's case, 97% of cases filed at the court between 1966 and 2010 were dismissed during this preliminary stage.
This is how that data looks, thanks to Craig Bloodworth at the Information Lab:
It is undeniable that the court has been getting busier. This shows pending cases since 1999:
The president of the European court of human rights, Sir Nicolas Bratza, says that the "30,000 repetitive cases pending before the court indicated a failure to remedy structural problems in the countries concerned and a collective failure of the implementation process, for which all 47 countries were
responsible."
The full data from 2011 is below. What can you do with it?
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