CYIL 2012

THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN 2011 try to establish if Czech cases are contentious – i.e. how often chamber judgments are being considered by the Grand Chamber and how often Czech cases are not decided by unanimity. Finally, we will show if cases coming from the Czech Republic are considered important, i.e. if some cases were relinquished by a Chamber or are indexed in HUDOC Search Portal 2 of the ECtHR as cases with high importance (1). We have drawn the data from the annual reports 3 of the Strasbourg Court and from the judgments themselves. Table 1 shows the development in number of categories, beginning from applications allocated to judicial formations. Still, as is clearly visible, only a tiny minority of applications already allocated to judicial formations make the whole way through the Strasbourg mechanism to the form of a judgment. But when a judgment is finally issued by an ECtHR chamber, it has declared in more than 90% of such cases that the Czech Republic violated the Convention. Unfortunately, the table is a little bit misleading, as we cannot easily say that out of a certain number of applications allocated to judicial formations each year, a certain number of such applications are declared inadmissible or struck out in that particular year. Because it takes some time to process the applications, the whole timeline presented in the table is not synchronized. To better illustrate our reservations about the data presented in Table 1, consider the following: while the number of applications allocated to judicial formations peaked in the year 2006, the number of applications declared inadmissible or struck out peaked two years later in 2008. Similarly, we cannot simply take, for example, the year 2011 and state that out of 523 applications allocated 22 judgments were produced. While those 523 applications were really allocated in the year 2011, the 22 judgments are the result of applications allocated probably three or four years earlier.

2 See: accessed 27 May 2012. 3 All available annual reports are to be found here: accessed 27 May 2012.

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