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Forthcoming rulings
The Court will be delivering Grand Chamber rulings in the cases of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland, Carême v. France and Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and 32 Others on 9 April 2024.
The case Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland concerns a complaint by a Swiss association and its members, who are a group of older women concerned about the consequences of global warming on their living conditions and health, that the Swiss authorities are not taking enough action to mitigate climate change.
The case Carême v. France concerns a complaint by a former inhabitant and mayor of the municipality of Grande-Synthe, who submits that France has taken insufficient steps to prevent global warming and that this failure entails a violation of the right to life and the right to respect for private and family life.
The case Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and 32 Others concerns the current and future severe effects of climate change, which the applicants attribute to the respondent States, and which they claim impact their lives, well-being, mental health and the peaceful enjoyment of their homes.
Chamber News
In the case of Verhoeven v. France the Court held that there had been no violation of the right to respect for family life.
The case concerned the decision of the French courts to order the return of the applicant’s son to Japan under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The applicant, a French national, had married a Japanese national in France and subsequently moved to Japan with him, where the couple had had a child. The applicant had returned to France with the child and filed a petition for divorce.
The Court found that the domestic courts had not ordered the child’s return automatically or mechanically but had duly taken into account the applicant’s claims in fair and adversarial proceedings. It further noted that the courts had given reasoned decisions that had sought to serve the child’s best interests and had ruled out any grave risk.
In the case of V.I. v. the Republic of Moldova the Court found several violations of the Convention.
The case concerned the placement of an orphan with a perceived mild intellectual disability in a psychiatric hospital against his will. He was under the care of the State at the time. At the end of what was supposed to be a three-week placement, he was left there for another four months, with nobody coming to visit or fetch him and being treated with neuroleptics and anti-psychotics.
The Court found that the existing Moldovan legal framework fell short of the State’s duty to establish and apply effectively a system providing protection to intellectually disabled persons in general, and to children without parental care in particular, against serious breaches of their integrity.
In the case of Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska v. Poland the Court held that there had been a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
The case concerned an NGO’s attempts to gain access to diaries of meetings of two Constitutional Court judges and to that court’s visitors’ logbook. The request for information took place against the background of doubts over whether the two judges had met with a politician whose status in criminal proceedings was being decided by the Constitutional Court.
The Court found that the NGO, a well-established organisation specialising in human rights and the rule of law, had sought to have access to the meeting diaries because it had been in the public interest, especially given the political context and debate over the impartiality of the Constitutional Court. Denying it access to such information had therefore interfered with the NGO’s right to receive and impart information.
In the case of K.J. and Others v. Russia the Court held that there had been several violations of the Convention.
The case concerned the Russian authorities’ removal orders in respect of three North Korean citizens to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It also concerned the detention of two other applicants in Russia.
The Court found that by handing an applicant over to the DPRK’s officials, the Russian authorities have put him at real risk of torture or death.
Grand Chamber News
The Chamber to which the case Mansouri v. Italy had been allocated has relinquished jurisdiction in favour of the Grand Chamber.
The case concerns the lawfulness and conditions of a Tunisian national’s confinement on board the ship being used to return him to his country of origin on the basis of a refusal-of-entry order issued by the border police.
On 19 February 2024, the Grand Chamber panel of five judges decided to reject all 18 requests for referral to the Grand Chamber.
The Court has decided to reject the request for an advisory opinion submitted by a panel of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Estonia.
The requesting court wanted to know whether a prosecutor’s decision to discontinue criminal proceedings could constitute an acquittal within the meaning of Article 4 § 1 of Protocol No. 7 (right not to be tried or punished twice) to the European Convention on Human Rights and, if so, whether such a decision could be considered final, given that, as happened in this case, it could be revoked by a higher-ranking prosecutor.
The ECHR ruled that the request did not raise a “question of principle” as required by Protocol No. 16, i.e., a novel and/or complex question, since the particular issue was the subject of well-established case-law. The discontinuance of criminal proceedings by a public prosecutor amounted to neither a conviction nor an acquittal, and Article 4 of Protocol No. 7 was therefore not applicable in such a situation.
Communication of cases
The Court has communicated to the Government of Lithuania the application Al-Nashiri v. Lithuania and has asked them to submit their observations on its admissibility and merits.
The case concerns a national of Saudi Arabia currently detained in Guantánamo Bay and facing capital charges before a United States (US) military commission on suspicion of, among other things, the bombing of the US Navy ship USS Cole in 2000. The US authorities consider him to have been one of the most senior figures in al-Qaeda.
In his case before the ECHR, the applicant raises multiple complaints of torture, ill-treatment and unacknowledged detention when he was held for five months in 2005-2006 at a secret facility in Lithuania run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Hearings
The Court held a Grand Chamber hearing in the case of Ships Waste Oil Collector B.V. and Others v. the Netherlands.
The case concerns the transmission of data, lawfully obtained in a criminal investigation, to another law enforcement authority, the Competition Authority, which used those data in an investigation into the applicant company’s involvement in price-fixing.
Decisions
The ECHR has declared inadmissible the application in the case of Ramadan v. France.
The case concerned the applicant’s conviction for having disseminated information about the identity of the presumed victim of a rape for which he was facing trial.
The Court noted that the domestic courts had clarified the concept of a “victim” for the purposes of the Freedom of the Press Act and had reaffirmed that only written authorisation from the person who had lodged the criminal complaint and joined the proceedings as a civil party could have released the applicant from his criminal liability under the law by waiving the duty of secrecy and allowing the dissemination of her identity.
The Court saw no reason to question the assessment by the domestic courts, which had weighed the applicant’s rights and those of the victim in the balance and had arrived at a solution based on relevant and sufficient grounds and found that the impugned interference with the applicant’s freedom of expression had been proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.
Other News
A new edition of the Rules of Court has been published. It includes amendments to Rule 39 on interim measures.
On 26 March 2024, Veronica Mihailov-Moraru, Minister of Justice of the Republic of Moldova, visited the Court and was received by President Síofra O’Leary. Diana Sârcu, Judge elected in respect of the Republic of Moldova, and Marialena Tsirli, Registrar of the Court, also attended the meeting.
Students from the University of Bucharest have been declared the winners of the 2024 René Cassin advocacy competition for law students after beating a rival team from the Bruges College of Europe in the final round.
The final took place at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on 22 March 2024 and the jury was made up of judges of the Court, lawyers, academics and representatives of the competition’s partner institutions. It was chaired by Mr François Sureau, lawyer, writer, and member of the French Academy.
- Press release
- More info
- Concours Cassin (in French only)