Dear Colleagues,
At the Committee meeting on 1 October, I was appointed as the new rapporteur on the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. I took over my predecessor Mr Evangelos Venizelos, who sadly left the Assembly following the latest electoral events in Greece.
It is a great honour for me to continue his work as well as the work of the previous rapporteurs on the Committee on this subject matter. Let me recall that the Committee’s first report on the implementation of Court judgments dates from June 2000. My report would be the 10th on this subject matter. The last one, authored by our former colleague Mr Pierre-Yves le Borgn’, dates from May 2017 and was followed by Assembly Resolution 2178 (2017) and Recommendation 2110 (2017).
During his mandate, Mr Venizelos took a number of steps in the preparation of the 10th report on the implementation of the Court’s judgments. The committee held two hearings with experts: one in April 2018 and another one in October 2018. Moreover, at the beginning of this year, Mr Venizelos organised four exchanges of views with heads or other representatives of national delegations of Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary and Italy.
In January 2018, Mr Venizelos presented to the Committee his introductory memorandum, in which he exposed his working methods as well as statistics concerning the implementation of Court judgments and information about the so-called “pockets of resistance” analysed in the 2017 report by Mr Le Borgn’. Today, I would like to submit to you a revised version of this document, including the most recent statistics coming from the Committee of Ministers and an update about the ‘problematic’ judgments mentioned in Mr Le Borgn’s report.
I would like to point out, that according to the 2018 Annual Report of the Committee of Ministers’, at 31 December 2018, 6 151 cases – at different stages of execution – were pending before the Committee of Ministers. Thus, the overall number of judgments pending before the Committee of Ministers has considerably fallen in comparison with the end of 2016 (9 941). It should also be underlined that in 2018, the Committee of Ministers closed its supervision of 2 705 cases.
As of 31 December 2018, the 10 following countries had the largest number of pending cases: Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan and the Republic of Moldova. As my predecessor Mr Venizelos organised exchanges of views with the heads of the delegations of four of those countries, I would like to continue this practice and I intend to organise an exchange of views with the head or another representative of the Romanian delegation at the Committee meeting in Paris on 10 December.
I would also like to recall that in February 2018, Mr Venizelos sent a letter to national delegations asking about the state of play of implementation of Resolution 2178 (2017). The replies provided to this letter have been summarised in the appendix to my information note that you will find in your files. Twenty-seven delegations have replied to this letter, but some of the provided answers are very general and insufficient and do not address all the recommendations contained in Resolution 2178 (2017). Nevertheless, some delegations have provided invaluable information about the parliamentary mechanisms for supervising the implementation of Court judgments.
Bearing this in mind, I would like to ask the Committee to declassify my information note, altogether with the appendix.