Superior Courts Network Forum takes place in Strasbourg
On 4 and 5 June 2026, the focal points of the Superior Courts Network, which comprises 112 member courts and eight observer courts, gathered in Strasbourg to share knowledge and advance judicial dialogue.
During the opening session, moderated by the Court’s Jurisconsult, Anna Austin, the President of the Court, Mattias Guyomar, highlighted that such meetings are a practical expression of courts’ shared responsibility for applying the Convention, within a system where the European Court of Human Rights plays a subsidiary supervisory role while domestic courts are at the forefront. He added that this meeting is also an opportunity to develop working relationships and strengthen personal ties.
The President then referred to the topic of Business and Human Rights, a transversal theme for which a new page has been launched on the Court’s Knowledge Sharing platform. The President elaborated on how the Court has dealt with cases concerning business: cases brought by businesses challenging regulations, and cases concerning the State’s positive obligations to regulate business activities where they may have affected the rights of individuals.
In her introductory remarks, the Registrar of the Court, Marialena Tsirli, underlined that the Court has developed the doctrine of “positive obligations”, recognising that States are required not only to refrain from interfering with Convention rights, but also to regulate business actors in order to ensure their effective protection.
Samuel Vuelta Simon, Secretary of State for Justice of Monaco, and Gianluca Esposito, Director General of the Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe, also addressed the participants during the opening session.
Chamber News
In the case of Tožičková v. the Czech Republic the Court held that there had been a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
The case concerned the arrest of a journalist during an environmental protest at a coal mine, more specifically, while she was in an area designated as out of bounds.
The Court found that the domestic courts had not provided adequate reasoning to justify the applicant’s arrest, the main effect of which had been to prevent the applicant, first, from performing her journalistic duties and communicating to the public information on a matter of general interest, and, secondly, from fulfilling her role as a “public watchdog” reporting on the police’s conduct towards the demonstrators. The applicant’s arrest had not met a pressing social need and could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society, taking into account also the narrow discretion enjoyed by the State in the present case.
In the case of J.B. v. Greece the Court held that there had been no violation of the right to an effective remedy in conjunction with the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment.
The case concerned the potential return of a Syrian national from Greece to Türkiye under the EU-Türkiye Statement, which aimed at stopping the flow of irregular migration via Türkiye to Europe.
The Court found that the authorities had conducted a thorough examination of the applicant’s asylum claim. They had considered the conditions he would face in Türkiye and the specific risks he had alleged, had consulted a wide range of reports and statistics and had examined the coherent set of assurances and monitoring mechanisms forming part of the EU-Türkiye Statement. At the judicial stage, the applicant had benefited from legal assistance and had been able to challenge the finding that Türkiye was a safe third country for him. He had received a detailed reply to his arguments, including to the reports that he had produced before the national courts.
The Court also held that there had been a violation concerning the conditions of detention as concerned his detention in the police station.
- Press release
- Press release (in Greek)
In the case of Sobczyńska and Others v. Poland the Court held that there had been a violation of the right to access to a court.
The case concerned a refusal in 2008 by the then President of the Republic to appoint the applicants to vacant judicial posts, without giving reasons, despite their having successfully participated in a competitive selection procedure and the absence of judicial review of that decision.
The Court found that the applicants had had a right to a fair procedure in the examination of their applications for a judicial post and had had a legitimate and reasonable expectation they would be given proper consideration. As the applicants had not been informed of the reasons for the President’s refusal to appoint them and had been unable to challenge that refusal, they had not been protected against what could legitimately be suspected to be an arbitrary decision.
In the case of Miladze v. Georgia the Court held that there had been no violation of the freedom of expression.
The case concerned the applicant’s administrative conviction for a video he had posted on TikTok criticising the new transport policies in Tbilisi and alleging misconduct by public officials. The video had gone viral.
The Court found that the Georgian courts had carried out a thorough and calibrated balancing exercise in the case, distinguishing robust political criticism from hostile personal denigration which was not protected under the Convention. It took into account in particular the aggressive and vulgar language used and the potential impact, especially for young people, of sexually explicit personal insults on a widely used social-media platform.
Grand Chamber News
The Court has accepted a request from Slovenia’s Supreme Court for an advisory opinion concerning landowners’ property rights in relation to the construction of national roads.
The Supreme Court has asked the Court to provide guidance on whether allowing the issuance of a building permit and the construction of a motorway without first expropriating the affected land constitutes an unjustified interference with the landowners’ property rights, as protected by Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention and Article 33 of the Constitution of Slovenia.
The Court has accepted a request for an advisory opinion submitted by the Constitutional Court of Luxembourg Court
The request concerns the compatibility with the provisions of the Convention, in particular Article 6 (right to a fair hearing), of the obligation for lawyers facing disciplinary proceedings to appear in person before a disciplinary tribunal and their impossibility of applying for a fresh hearing in the event of an in absentia decision against them. It will be examined by the Grand Chamber, comprising 17 judges, constituted in accordance with Rule 24 § 2 (g) of the Rules of Court. This is the first request for an advisory opinion submitted by one of the highest courts in Luxembourg.
Hearings
The Court held a Grand Chamber hearing in the case of S.O. v. Spain.
The case concerns the removal of the applicant’s nipple and areola, allegedly carried out without her consent, during an operation to save her breasts from cancer, and subsequent court proceedings.
Decisions
The ECHR has declared the application in the case of Mouelhi v. Belgium inadmissible.
The case concerned an applicant for international protection who complained that he had not been provided with accommodation or material assistance in Belgium, as required by law, despite the final judgment of the Brussels French-Language Employment Tribunal.
The Court found that the applicant’s conduct amounted to abuse of the right of individual application. It noted that the applicant had deliberately attempted to mislead it by submitting false information in support of his request for an interim measure, in which he had stated that he was reduced to living on the streets in Belgium, when it could be seen from the documents submitted later by the respondent Government that he had been accommodated as an applicant for international protection in the Netherlands for nearly five months. Moreover, he had not corrected this information in the application form submitted after requesting the interim measure nor when he had updated his file at the Court’s request. On the contrary, he had expressly reiterated that he was still having to sleep on the streets.
The Court has declared the application in the case of Vendrame and Others v. Italy inadmissible.
The application concerned the imposition of land-use restrictions on private plots of land belonging to two of the applicants due to the incorporation of the land into a newly instituted nature reserve. The land was being used by the other applicant, an agricultural company, for poplar harvesting. In October 2011, a request by the company for authorisation from the municipality of Codroipo to replant a poplar grove on the land was refused for incompatibility with the land-use restrictions.
The applicants lodged proceedings challenging the incorporation of the land in the nature reserve, arguing, amongst other things, that that they had not been provided with compensation for such restrictions. The domestic courts dismissed their action, noting that the restrictions did not give rise to a right to compensation, as they had not been imposed with a view to expropriating the land. However, other allowances were available instead.
Paying particular regard to the State’s leeway in the context of environmental protection policies, the Court considered that a fair balance had been struck between the general interest and the applicants’ right to decide how to use their land.
The ECHR has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Macovei v. Romania.
The case concerned proceedings brought by the applicant, a politician, to challenge sanctions imposed on her for having violated the rules on election financing during her 2014 presidential campaign.
The Court held that the applicant’s actions and the sanctions imposed on her related to electoral misconduct. The actions were not classified as “criminal” under Romanian law since the domestic authorities did not consider them to be criminal offences, but only minor offences. Also, they were not criminal in nature.
- Press release
- Press release (in Romanian)
The Court has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Fliegenschnee and Others v. Austria.
The case concerned the Austrian Federal Minister for Economic and Digital Affairs’ refusal to ban the sale of fossil fuels to mitigate the impact of climate change as she was not competent in that regard.
The Court found that the three individual applicants who had brought the case had not provided evidence to show that they had been personally affected by climate change, either because of their age or health issues or owing to crop shortfalls caused by drought. They could not therefore claim to be victims of a violation of the right to respect for private and family life or the protection of property and those complaints were inadmissible.
As concerned the remaining applicant, Umweltschutzorganisation Global 2000, the Court considered that it was not necessary to decide whether it had standing to bring its complaints under Article 8 of the Convention because they were inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded. In particular Article 8 did not guarantee the right to a specific measure, namely a ban on the sale of fossil fuels under the Austrian Trade Act.
The Court has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Văscăuţanu v. Romania.
The case concerned the effectiveness of a preventive remedy, namely an application to a post-sentencing judge. The purpose of the remedy was to put an end to situations breaching rights to prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment where prisoners had alleged poor conditions of detention while serving their prison terms.
The Court noted that an application to a post-sentencing judge was an effective preventive remedy to be used, from 6 April 2023 onwards, by anyone complaining of poor conditions of detention. That remedy was complementary to the compensatory remedy available to people who alleged that they had been detained in conditions breaching the European Convention but were no longer in that situation at the time they brought their action. The applicant, however, had failed to make use of either of those effective remedies – both of which had been available to him and had offered reasonable prospects of success – at any time during his detention in various prisons.
- Press release
- Press release (in Romanian)
The Court has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Fillon and Others v. France.
The application essentially concerned the fairness of the trial of the three applicants who had all been convicted of embezzlement of public funds, handling of those funds or complicity in the offence.
The Court noted, first, that the applicants’ allegation of a lack of independence and impartiality in the preliminary investigation stage of the proceedings against them was not manifestly ill-founded and that it was not its task to intervene in the national debate concerning reform of the public prosecution service in France. It then held that the criminal proceedings in question, taken as a whole, had been fair within the meaning of the Convention.
The Court has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Otegi Mondragón and Others v. Spain.
The case concerned the review proceedings following the ECHR’s 2018 judgment Otegi Mondragón and Others v. Spain, in which the Court found a violation of the Convention on the grounds that the applicants, five Spaniards, had not been tried by an impartial tribunal when convicted by the Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) in 2011 for being members of the terrorist organisation ETA.
Other News
On 10 June, the President of the Court, Mattias Guyomar, met with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Committee, Changrok Soh, in Strasbourg. Accompanied by Ivana Jelić, Vice President and judge elected in respect of Montenegro, Anja Seibert Fohr, judge elected in respect of Germany, and Vasilka Sancin, judge elected in respect of Slovenia, the interlocutors exchanged on a number of substantive issues related to human-rights protection, as well as on the upcoming meeting with representatives of the United Nations Treaty Bodies, which will be held on 30 June in Strasbourg.
On 9 June 2026, the Minister of Justice of Portugal, Rita Alarcão Júdice, visited the Court and met President Mattias Guyomar. The judge elected in respect of Portugal, Ana Maria Guerra Martins, and the Deputy Registrar, Abel Campos, also attended the meeting. The interlocutors underlined Portugal’s support for the Court, the Convention system and its values. They recalled the importance of the Court’s continuous dialogue and engagement with the Portuguese judiciary.