René Cassin ECHR Moot Court

As has now become a good tradition, the René Cassin competition will take place again this year in Strasbourg. The competition is a french-language European Convention on Human Rights moot court for university students, named after the second president of the European Court. This the key information about the competition:

The 27th René Cassin human rights advocacy competition, consisting of mock legal proceedings in French based on the European Convention on Human Rights and open to students of law and political science, will be held on 23 and 24 April 2012. Sixteen university teams from six countries (France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia and Switzerland), selected following the written stage of the competition, will compete at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in a case concerning the rights of asylum seekers. The mock courts in the semi-finals will be made up of academics, judges, lawyers and officials from the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights.

The two most successful teams will meet in the final, to be held in the Court’s hearing room on 24 April at 2 p.m., before a panel of prominent figures (including judges of the Court and academics) chaired by Mr Philippe Leclerc, Representative for France of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Further information about this year’s competition and previous contests can be found on the René Cassin competition Internet site and on the page of the Court’s website dedicated to the competition. Those wishing to attend the final on 24 April should register no later than 19 April using the online form available on this page.

Brighton

As negotiations and preparations are ongoing for the meeting of Ministers later this week on ECHR reform in Brighton, here are a few updates:

* A new joint NGO Statement on Brighton

* An academic initiative of the University of Sussex calling for wider support for the European Court of Human Rights.

* Strasbourg - A reckoning : an open page by the Guardian newspaper to counter all the nonsense written by some of the British Press. The page invites readers to indicate important judgments to show what Strasbourg really does.

* A post by Open Society Justice Inititative director James Goldston expressing concern about the fact that civil society is largely excluded from the debates running up to and during the Brighton conference.

* An article in the Independent newspaper about calls on the UK government to confront Russia on its failure to effectively comply with European Court of Human Rights judgments.

Brighton Conference Programme Online

The programme for next week's Brighton conference on the European Court of Human Rights has been put online by the British chairmanship of the Council of Europe. It can be found here. Unfortunately, it says nothing much, certainly not about what precise issues will be addressed during the conference. Considering that each delegation will only have three minutes speaking time in the plenary, remaining issues to be negotiated will have to be done in the corridors and bilateral conference rooms ...

Inter-State Case Georgia v Russia goes to Grand Chamber

Last week, the Chamber which had been assigned to adjudicate on the Georgia v Russia (No. 2) inter-state complaint - about the war of 2008 - relinquished jurisdiction in favour of the Grand Chamber of the European Court.

Earlier, in December 2011 the Chamber had already declared the case admissible (mainly by joining most admissibility issues to the merits, to be decided on later). A hearing had also already been held in September of that year. Of course, formally such a relinquishment to the Grand chamber can happen at any time in the proceedings as Article 30 ECHR indicates:

Where a case pending before a Chamber raises a serious question affecting the interpretation of the Convention or the Protocols thereto, or where the resolution of a question before the Chamber might have a result inconsistent with a judgment previously delivered by the Court, the Chamber may, at any time before it has rendered its judgment, relinquish jurisdiction in favour of the Grand Chamber, unless one of the parties to the case objects.

However, one may wonder why it happens at this stage. If the Grand Chamber is more suited to deal with the case, it would have made more sense to relinquish jurisdiction before hearings took place, since now a different group of judges will have to assess the facts and the law. Could it be that the case does after all raise serious questions of interpretation or are rather serious questions of political sensitivity at stake, for which a Grand Chamber judgment might be a more suitable vehicle, considering its greater weight and importance? One consideration might be that this means that the judgment cannot be challenged later on, since the Grand Chamber is the last port of call in the Strasbourg system. In any event, the case of high importance has now been dragging on for over 3.5 years, certainly not a record yet, but now that the Grand Chamber will take over more patience will be needed before a final judgment is rendered.

Happy Everything

Ēostre or Ostara (Northumbrian Old English: Ēostre; West Saxon Old English: Ēastre; Old High German: *Ôstara) is a goddess in Germanic paganism who, by way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ; West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High German: Ôstarmânoth), is the namesake of the festival of Easter. Ēostre is attested by Bede in his 8th-century work De temporum ratione, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent to the month of April) feasts were held in Eostre's honor among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, but had died out by the time of his writing. 

Hello people. It's another holiday period for many around the world. I was going to try and be clever and research all the different denominations' equivalents of Easter, but time is in short supply here at the Article, so instead I copy-pasted a bit of the ol' Wiki page on the subject (above).

Let me just say then, happy times to all, peace and goodwill, all that good stuff. Articles Part 2 coming after the weekend, when I get back from Wrocław. See you all then!

- Jim :)

Brighton Update - New Version of the Draft Declaration

A lot has been written on the preparations for the Brighton conference on the ECHR. The newest version of the Draft Brighton Declaration was discussed yesterday in Strasbourg. I have not been able to track an online version of this newest draft, but apart from a number of points which have been left out (no consensus on those?), it is striking that the state parties still envisage to include the margin of appreciation explicitly in the ECHR. Secondly, the most debated admissibility criterion change is still in, but in a slightly different way:

"Concludes that Article 35 of the Convention should further be amended to make clear that an application is manifestly ill-founded within the meaning of Article 35(3)(a), inter alia, to the extent that the Court is satisfied that the application raises a complaint that has been duly considered by a national court applying the Convention in light of the well-established case law of the Court, unless the application raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of the Convention; and invites the Committee of Ministers to adopt the necessary amending instrument by the end of 2013."

The old draft read as follows:

"Concludes that Article 35 of the Convention should further be amended to make clear that an application is inadmissible if it is the same in substance as a matter that has been examined by a national court taking into account the rights guaranteed by the Convention, unless the Court considers that:
i) The national court clearly erred in its interpretation or application of the Convention rights; or
ii) The application raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of the Convention."

Finally, what in the last draft were still several options about the time limit within which to lodge complaints with the Court (two, three or four months) has now been changed into four months (as opposed to the current six).

ECHR Articles

Thanks to our documentalists here at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) I found a range of ECHR articles which I think I had not mentioned earlier. One is a special issue of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (2010, vol. 61, no. 3) dedicated to positive obligations, which included the following articles:

* C. Donnelly, 'Positive obligations and privatisation', pp. 209-224.
* E. Palmer, 'Beyond arbitrary interference: the right to a home? Developing socio-economic duties in the European Convention on Human Rights' pp. 225-244.
* U. Kinkelly, 'Protecting children's rights under the ECHR: the role of positive obligations', pp. 245-262.
* R. O'Connell, 'Realising political equality: the European Court of Human Rights and positive obligations in a democracy' pp. 263-280.
* D. Russell, Supplementing the European Convention on Human Rights: legislating for positive obligations, pp. 281-294.

And then two more recent articles from other journals:

* F. Fabbrini, 'The European Court of Human Rights, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the right to abortion: Roe v. Wade on the other side of the Atlantic?', Columbia Journal of European Law, vol. 18, no. 1 (2011/12) pp. 1-54.

* M. Fyrnys, 'Expanding competences by judicial lawmaking: the pilot judgment procedure of the European Court of Human Rights', German Law Journal, vol. 12, no. 5 (2011), pp. 1231-1260.