EU 
Romania,
Bulgaria and Poland: the EU's most frequent violators of the
European Convention on Human Rights in 2012
05.02.2012
Member states of the European
Union were found to have violated the European Convention on
Human Rights in 486 different cases last year. [1] Cyprus had
no cases brought against it at all, while the three worst offenders
were Poland, with 56 judgements finding at least one violation,
out of 74 cases brought to the court; Bulgaria (58 judgements,
64 cases); and Romania (70 judgments, 79 cases).
Cases in which the Romania
state was found to have violated Convention rights include Creanga,
in which the pre-trial detention of a police officer was found
to be unlawful; Albu and Others, in which the Court found
that the state "deprived the provisions of Article 10 [freedom
of expression] of all useful effect and had hindered the applicants
in pursuing their profession as radio journalists"; and
Anca Mocanu, which ruled that there had been a failure
to investigate the death of a man during the June 1990 demonstrations
against the Romanian government. [2]
In the case of Stamose,
Bulgaria was found to have violated the freedom of an individual
to leave their country after imposing a two-year travel ban on
a Bulgarian citizen following his deportation from the USA. In
Yordanova and Others, the court found violations of the
rights to respect for a private and family life and respect for
the home when it ordered the eviction of a Roma settlement without
any clear plans to rehouse the families affected. [3]
The Polish authorities
were criticised by the court in cases such as Kaperzynski,
in which the Court found a violation of the right to freedom
of expression. Following a newspaper article in which he criticised
a local mayor's handling of defects in a sewage system, the mayor's
office took him to court and he was banned from working as a
journalist for two years. The European Court found that "the
interference with the applicant's freedom of expression had been
disproportionate." [4]
In the case of Miaždžyk,
Poland was found to have violated the right to freedom of movement
through the issuing of an order prohibiting a French national
leaving Poland during criminal proceedings that lasted over five
years. [5]
Other 'high-ranking' EU
member states include Greece (52 cases in which at least one
violation was found, out of 56 cases) and Italy (36 violations
found, out of 63 cases).
In one case, Greece was
found to have violated Article 3 of the Convention, which prohibits
torture, following its failure to provide "sufficient redress"
to a Turkish man who was travelling to Greece in a vessel that
was intercepted by the Greek coastguard. The coastguard escorted
the man and his fellow travellers to a port in Crete, and was
raped by a coastguard officer. Despite a subsequent investigation
and prosecution, the Court found that:
"The Greek criminal-law
system, as applied in the present case, had not had the desired
deterrent effect such as to prevent the commission of the offence
complained of by the applicant, nor had it provided adequate
redress for the ill-treatment meted out to him." [6]
The most widely-reported
case involving Italy is that of Hirsi Jamaa and Others,
in which an asylum-seeker who sought to challenge a deportation
order but was faced with remedies "available in theory,"
but whose "accessibility in practice had been limited by
a number of factors." The Court found that "without
its intervention, the applicant would have been deported to Sudan
without his claims having been subjected to the closest possible
scrutiny." [7]
Pending application brought
against Italy stood at 14,188 at the end of 2012, putting it
way ahead of any other EU member state. However, cases concerning
the Russian state are causing the biggest workload for the Court:
28,593 applications were pending at the end of 2012.
While cases against EU
member states made up the majority of the Court's work in 2012,
Russia had the largest number of findings against it - of 134
cases, at least one violation of a Convention provision was found
in 122 cases.
The Council of Europe's
Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, notes in the
annual report of the Court that it is "overloaded",
but that "the problem is not that people complain, but that
many of them have reasons to do so."
He goes on to say that:
"The main reason
why the Court is overloaded is that people have found that justice
could not be obtained at home. The obvious answer is that much
more must be done to protect human rights at home, at the domestic
level… The problems of the Court are primarily symptoms
of a deeper crisis: human rights principles are still not taken
sufficiently seriously in our member states."
Sources
[1] Council of
Europe, Annual Report 2012
of the European Court of Human Rights, January 2013
[2] Information Notes on the Court's case-law: February
2012; May
2012; November
2012
[3] Information Notes on the Court's case-law: November
2012; April
2012
[4] Information Notes on the Court's case-law: April
2012
[5] Information Notes on the Court's case-law: January
2012
[6] Ibid.
[7] Information Notes on the Court's case-law: February
2012;