Brighton conference: Britain risks reducing access to court for human rights victims

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is a vital backstop for justice and accountability and must be given the authority it needs to do its work Amnesty International said today, as ministers of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe debated changes to the Court at the Brighton conference.

The Brighton Declaration is due to set out changes to the way that the Court operates, which may reduce access to its protection for some of the 800 million individuals across Europe for whom the Court is a last resort.

Tara Lyle, Policy Adviser at Amnesty International, said:

“Amnesty welcomes the aspects of the Brighton Declaration which seek to reduce the number of cases heard at the Court, by insisting that countries comply with their human rights obligations at home. The obvious way to reduce the number of decisions overturned by the European Court is for every country to make the right decisions in its own courts in the first place.

“But Ken Clarke is so insistent that Britain should not be obliged to put up with interference from Strasbourg that he is willing to reduce the scrutiny of decisions made in domestic courts across Europe. It’s not only the UK that wants Strasbourg to butt out of its business; Russia and Ukraine will also plead that their courts can be relied upon to get it right.

“UK courts don’t always get it right. It was this self-same European Court of Human Rights that reprimanded the UK government when it wanted to indefinitely retain the DNA of innocent people, when it prevented the Sunday Times from breaking the Thalidomide story and when it decided that it was happy to indefinitely detain terror suspects without charge or trial.

“The villain in this piece are the people in the dock, not the dock itself. These changes might allow Britain greater autonomy in a handful of cases that have gone against it, but they will also offer increased impunity to human rights abusers across Europe.”

Cases from Britain account for only 2.4 per cent of those reviewed by the court. More than 25 per cent of cases come from Russia. Collectively, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Poland and Bulgaria account for more than 50 per cent of its caseload. For individuals from those countries the court provides the only means of redress for millions of people.

This February, the court found Russia responsible after police took a man from his cell into a forest where they beat, kicked and throttled him to force a confession to murder. The court also held Ukraine responsible for a police beating which left a man disabled. In both cases, the authorities failed to investigate police crimes and to bring those responsible to justice.