Today, the European Court of Human Rights presented the results of its work for 2017.
Speaking at the Court’s annual press conference on 25 January 2018, President Guido Raimondi reviewed the year 2017 and presented the statistics for the past year.
He referred in particular to the increase in the number of new cases, but said that a large number of applications had been declared inadmissible for failure to exhaust domestic remedies. In that connection the President reiterated the importance of the principle of subsidiarity, which requires applicants to exhaust national remedies before applying to the Court.
According to ECHR annual statistics for 2017, 63,350 applications were allocated to a judicial formation in 2017, an increase of 19% compared to 2016 – this was largely because of an increase in the number of allocated applications concerning Turkey.
For Armenia, 356 new applications were received by the Court, less than 50% as compared to 753 new applications in 2016.
Relative to every 10,000 inhabitants, the member states for which the highest number of applications were allocated – not including San Marino and Liechtenstein – were Romania (3.31), Turkey (3.25), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2.47), Montenegro (2.22) and Moldova (2.13). For Armenia, the ratio was 1.19 applications per 10,000 population.
85,951 applications were decided in 2017, an increase of 123% compared to 2016. For Armenia, 109 applications were declared inadmissible or struck out, 44 were communicated to the Government, and in 12 applications a judgment was delivered.
The European Court of Human Rights issued 1,068 judgments in 2017, of which 908 (85%) found at least one violation of the human rights convention. For Armenia, out of 12 judgments delivered in 11 at least one violation was found.
The European Court of Human Rights issued 20,637 judgments between 1959 and 2017, of which 17,307 (84%) found at least one violation of the human rights convention.
For Armenia, total number of judgments delivered between 1959 and 2017 was 87, in 79 out of them at least one violation was found. The highest number of violations related to the right to a fair trial, and right to liberty and security.
Over the course of the year, the number of applications pending before a judicial formation fell by 29% from approximately 79,750 to 56,250 – this was mainly due to large groups of applications that were dealt with concerning a few countries in particular (e.g. Ukraine).
For Armenia, there are 1,819 applications pending (3.2% of all applications pending before the Court); Armenia is thus within the top-ten states by the number of pending applications.
