EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

When the Court finds against a State and observes that the applicant has sustained damage, it awards the applicant just satisfaction, that is to say a sum of money by way of compensation for that damage. The Committee of Ministers ensures that any sum awarded by the Court is actually paid to the applicant. Over the past few years the Court has developed a new procedure to cater for the massive influx of applications concerning similar issues, also known as “systemic issues” – i.e. those that arise from non-conformity of domestic law with the Convention. The Court has thus recently been implementing a procedure that consists of examining one or more applications of this kind, whilst its examination of a series of similar cases is adjourned (in other words, postponed). When it delivers its judgment in a pilot case, it calls on the Government concerned to bring the domestic legislation into line with the Convention and indicates the general measures to be taken. It will then proceed to dispose of the other similar cases. . More details on this procedure can be found in the next segment of the textbook. 5. PILOT JUDGMENT PROCEDURE The Court has been a victim of its own success: over 50,000 new applications are lodged every year. The repercussions of certain judgments of the Court on a regular basis and the growing recognition of its work among nationals of the states parties, have had a considerable impact on the number of cases brought every year. Many of the cases pending before the ECtHR are so-called “repetitive cases”, which derive from a common dysfunction at the national level. The pilot judgment procedure was developed as a technique to identify the structural problems underlying repetitive cases against many countries and imposing an obligation on the States to address those problems. When the ECtHR receives several applications that share a root cause, it can select one or more for priority treatment under the pilot procedure. In a pilot judgment, the Court’s task is not only to decide whether a violation of the ECHR has occurred in a specific case, but also to identify the systemic problem and provide the Government with clear indications of the type of remedial measures needed to resolve it. A key feature of the pilot procedure is the possibility of adjourning, or “freezing,” related cases for a period of time on the condition that the Government act promptly to adopt the national measures required to satisfy the judgment. Meanwhile, the Court may resume examining adjourned cases whenever the interests of justice so require. The objectives of the pilot judgment procedure are to 1) assist the 47 European States that have ratified the ECHR in solving systemic or structural problems at the national level; 2) to offer the possibility of a speedier redress to the individuals concerned; 3) to help the ECtHR manage its workload more efficiently and thoroughly by reducing the number of similar – usually complex – cases that have to be examined in detail. The first pilot judgment in the history of the Court was in the case of Broniowski v. Poland and was delivered by the Grand Chamber on 22 June 2004. It concerned the subject of properties situated beyond the Bug River – which affected some 80,000 people. In this case, the ECtHR requested actions through appropriate legal and administrative procedures to ensure the implementation of property rights in respect to the remaining Bug River claimants or provide them with equivalent redress. Following this judgment and the Court’s adjournment of similar applications, Poland passed a new Law in July 2005 providing for financial compensation for properties abandoned beyond the Bug River. Finding that the new law and the compensation scheme were effective in practice, the ECtHR then struck down more than 200 similar applications in 2007 and 2008 that had been adjourned and decided that the continued application of the pilot-judgment procedure in the case was no longer justified. In February 2011 the ECtHR added a new rule to its Rules of Court clarifying how it handles potential systemic or structural violations of human rights. The new rule codifies the Court’s existing “pilot-judgment procedure”, introduced for cases where there is a systemic or

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EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION