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

3.8 Manifestly ill-founded applications Article 35 § 3 (a) of the Convention sets forth the reason of inadmissibility for insufficient grounding in a complaint. An application is considered “manifestly ill-founded” if a preliminary examination of its substance does not disclose any appearance of a violation of the Convention rights. This type of complaints can be divided into four groups: 1) “fourth instance” complaints, which obtained its name from the practice of a large number of the applicants lodging their complaints with the Court with the aim being to overrule national decisions. The European Court has no jurisdiction to examine the facts that have led a national court to adoption of a particular decision (see e.g. Perlala v. Greece ). 2) complaints where there has clearly or apparently been no violation. This category deals with the clear or apparent absence of a violation and includes three subcategories: (a) cases in which there is no appearance of arbitrary actions or unfairness on the whole; (b) cases in which there is no appearance of a lack of proportion between the aims and the means; and (c) the other relatively straightforward substantive issues where there is settled and abundant case law of the Court in identical or similar cases, on the basis of which it can conclude that there has been no breach of the Convention ( Galev and Others v. Bulgaria ) 3) unsubstantiated complaints are those that lack evidence of the facts on which the alleged violations are based ( Trofimchuk v. Ukraine ). 4) confused or far-fetched complaints. These are usually the applications where the exposition of facts, as presented by the applicant, is deliberately contrary to common sense. 3.9 No significant disadvantage The last and the latest type of criterion of admissibility refers to the complaints in which an applicant has not suffered a significant disadvantage. The purpose of this new (as of Protocol. No. 14) criterion is to provide the Court with an additional tool which should assist it in its filtering work and allow it to devote more time to cases which warrant examination on the merits. It is hard to determine a universal meaning of a notion “significant”. In some cases the Court concluded that the loss of an amount of less than one Euro did not have any important repercussions on the applicant’s personal life ( Korolev v. Russia ). In other cases the Court came to a similar conclusion when the sum was significantly higher, 177 Euros. Therefore, it could be said that the Court assesses personal circumstances of the applicants case by case. The important guarantee is that the complaint may not be rejected with regard to this reason if respect for human rights as defined in the Convention and the Protocols thereto requires an examination of the application on the merits. Previously, a case could not be rejected for non-significant disadvantage if it has not been duly considered by a domestic tribunal. In accordance with Article 5 of Protocol No. 15 to the Convention, the words “and provided that no case may be rejected on this ground which has not been duly considered by a domestic tribunal” in Article 35, paragraph 3, sub-paragraph b of the ECHR shall be deleted. It means that the last ground for inadmissibility will be applied by the Court in a stricter manner.

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION

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