eComms
Terms and conditions
eComms is a service put in place to allow electronic communication with the Court.
1. General
By accepting the eComms procedure you declare that you have understood that, as in the case of correspondence sent by post or other means, you must answer to the Court’s requests within the deadlines set out in the letters submitted to you. Documents sent by the Court are deemed to have been delivered on the day of their transmission to your ECHR Services account. This system of notification will enable you to have more time to meet the deadlines. The Court would draw your attention to Article 37 § 1 (a) of the Convention, according to which, if the applicant fails to react within the deadlines where the circumstances lead to the conclusion that the applicant does not intend to pursue the application, the Court may strike a case out of its list of cases.
You should regularly connect to your ECHR Services account and contact the Court immediately in the event of a technical problem.
2. Data retention
Documents published to eComms are only stored for 12 months. For this reason it is your responsibility to download and save the documents sent by the Court before the 12-month limit expires.
In addition, once an application has been finished, all related documents will be deleted from the eComms system.
3. Naming convention
Only the use of characters from the Extended ASCII (Cyrillic characters or other alphabets cannot be used) is authorised in the titles of documents transmitted to the Court:
4. Document format
Documents sent to the Court must be in PDF format only, duly signed if necessary. The PDF documents must be of the type “text PDF” and not “image-based PDF”.
5. Document size
PDF documents should be optimised so they are as small as possible without sacrificing readability.
- The maximum authorised size per PDF document is 50 Mb.
- If a document exceeds this limit, then it should be split and named accordingly (e.g. Part 1, Part 2, etc.).
- If a document is under this limit, then it should not be split into separate documents.
6. Date and time sent
The date and time of transmission displayed on eComms is Strasbourg (France) local time.
7. Supported Web browsers
eComms is only supported under the Windows and Mac OS X.
The following web browsers are supported:
- Microsoft Edge
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla FireFox
JavaScript must be enabled in these web browsers.
eComms functions with the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version is available). It also functions with the current and previous major release of Firefox.
8. Technical issues
If you cannot access eComms or if you are unable to send or receive documents, please try to access the site from another computer. If the technical problem persists, please contact the Court immediately.
In case of difficulty and if the documents must be sent urgently (e.g. to comply with time limits), then they should be sent by fax (+33 (0)3 88 41 27 30).
9. Rule 39 (interim measures) of the Rules of Court
eComms should not be used for Rule 39 correspondence prior to communication of the case.