Suchergebnisse

In a January 31, 2019 decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, or Court) held that Russia, the respondent state, should pay Georgia, the applicant state, 10 million euros as just satisfaction for violations committed by Russia against Georgian nationals; these violations had previously been established in the Court's main judgment in 2014 (Georgia v. Russia). The Court also held that Georgia should distribute this amount to approximately fifteen hundred Georgian victims, which had been identified in the Court's main judgment in 2014. In this important decision, the ECtHR continued to build on its recent case law, in holding that just satisfaction, in the form of monetary compensation, was appropriate and available in an interstate dispute.

The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, or the Court) in Mammadov v. Azerbaijan was the first "infringement procedure" judgment pursuant to Article 46(4) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, or the Convention). This procedure was introduced to the Convention by Protocol 14, which entered into force in 2010. The idea behind it was that the Committee of Ministers—the body of the Council of Europe that supervises the execution of judgments of the ECtHR—could return the case to the Court to confirm that the responded state had failed to enforce it. Although there are quite a few instances of non-execution, this procedure has not been in use because it is difficult to initiate and its results are uncertain. The Mammadov judgment was a test of the effectiveness of infringement procedures, but it failed to provide a definitive answer as to whether such procedures were effective in terms of state implementation of ECtHR judgments. The applicant in this case was a political prisoner and the Committee of Ministers fruitlessly tried for a number of years to force Azerbaijan to release him. Soon after the Article 46(4) request reached the Court, the Azerbaijani authorities conditionally released the applicant. That said, all other negative consequences of his criminal conviction, such as an inability to run for election, have yet to be removed, so the judgment has not been implemented in full.

In E.S. v. Austria, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a criminal conviction for making disparaging comments about the Prophet Muhammad, intimating in particular that he was a pedophile, did not violate the speaker's right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

On November 15, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued its judgment in Navalnyy v. Russia. The applicant in the case argued that the Russian authorities had targeted him for arrest and administrative sanctions because of his political activism. In its judgment, the Grand Chamber confirmed its recent change in approach to Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the normalization of the provision's scope and burden of proof. However, it displayed continued uncertainty about how to deal with measures based on a mixture of legitimate and illegitimate purposes.

On October 15, 2015, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in the case of Perinçek v. Switzerland. The judgment contested a criminal provision applied in Switzerland against a Turkish politician who had publicly denied a historical fact of the Armenian genocide. Notwithstanding variations in reasoning, the outcome in the Grand Chamber is similar to the previous decision of the Chamber on this case in 2013. The Swiss criminal provision applied in the context of the denial of the Armenian genocide was again found irreconcilable with freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Zakharov v. Russia held that the Russian system of surveillance constituted a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This decision is not the first judgment concerning surveillance, but it is of note because it is a Grand Chamber judgment in which the ECtHR drew together strands of its existing case law. It comes at a time when national systems of surveillance are the subject of much scrutiny: further cases are pending before the ECtHR.

On July 1, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court or the Grand Chamber) delivered its judgment in the case of S.A.S. v. France pertaining to the legality of the French ban on wearing full-face veils in public, introduced by Law No. 2010-1192 of October 11, 2010. The decision comes on the heels of a number of related judgments in adjacent areas of dispute circumscribing the right to privacy and religion and delimiting the circumstances that may justify interference with such fundamental human rights. In the present case, the Court for the first time had to deal with a general ban on certain clothing that arguably, for those most affected, epitomizes the manifestation of their religion. Accepting the principle of "living together (le 'vivre ensemble')" as an inherent element of the "rights and freedoms of others" in the French context and conceding a wide margin of appreciation to the respondent state in preserving that principle, the Court found no violation of the applicant's rights to respect for her private life (Article 8) and to freedom of religion (Article 9) under the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention).

In our critique of a recent article by Sudha Pai (CIS vol. 34, no. 2) we argue that she provides inadequate evidence to support her case that there has been a dramatic change in dominance relationships in western UP. We identify problems of evidence in her claims about the significance of rising education of Chamars, and in the consequences of the changes that have taken place. We also suggest that her account of dominance needs to consider the erstwhile dominant as well as the dominated, and that she ignores evidence of the extent to which previously dominant castes have merely changed the ways in which they enforce compliance when necessary. Her evidence of change is inadequate: she provides perceptions of changes instead. We also question the generalisability of her predictions, and use data from our own ongoing research in Bijnor district to suggest a modified picture of increasing access to schooling among the Chamars of western UP, and its likely effects.

On November 4, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) held in Tarakhel v. Switzerland, in a 14 to 3 decision, that Swiss authorities would violate Article 3 (prohibition of torture/inhuman and degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention) if the applicants were to be expelled to Italy, in application of the Dublin Regulation, without Switzerland having first obtained assurances from the Italian authorities that "the applicants would be taken charge of in a manner adapted to the age of the children and that the family would be kept together."

On May 27, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights rendered its judgment in the case of Marguš v. Croatia. The applicant, who had served in the Croatian Army, was convicted of war crimes in 2007, following an earlier decision in 1997 to grant him amnesty for these crimes. A majority of the Grand Chamber drew on Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention) and general international law to argue that Article 4 of Protocol No. 7 of the Convention (the right not to be tried or punished twice) was inapplicable in these circumstances and that the applicant's claim on this point was inadmissible. The Grand Chamber also ruled that there had been no violation of Article 6 of the Convention (the right to a fair trial).