European Court has started working under new rules
However, adopting the 14th Protocol took no less time. In 2006, Russia, alone among all Council of Europe members, refused to ratify this document. Among other things, State Duma deputies considered that the new rules gave excessive powers to both the Court and the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers (CMCE) to interfere in the internal affairs of states. In January 2010, Russia was finally persuaded of the need for ratification, so now the new rules of the ECHR regulation will come into effect.
"The entry into force of the 14th Protocol represents a major step in improving the efficiency of the Court and protecting human rights in Europe," stated a joint declaration by Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland and ECHR President Jean-Paul Costa.
One of the arguments in favor of ratifying the 14th Protocol that the Russian Foreign Ministry presented to deputies in January was that it would improve relations between Russia and other Council of Europe countries. According to First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Denisov, this was supposed to improve "our position in the dialogue with the Council of Europe and with the member states of this organization on key political issues." "The lack of movement from the Russian side towards ratification of the Protocol reduced Russia's ability to influence the European Court of Human Rights when considering cases sensitive to it. Moreover, it limited our ability to put forward initiatives and proposals to coordinate efforts on reforming the Court, and the Court needs such reform," Mr. Denisov said then.
Deputies agreed with this argument, but so far our relations with the ECHR have rather worsened, not improved. In mid-May, the Grand Chamber of the Court reviewed the case of Great Patriotic War veteran Vasily Kononov against Latvia and ruled in favor of Latvia, which had convicted the old man half a century later for war crimes against civilians under a law that did not exist during the war. President Dmitry Medvedev called this ruling "politically biased." And the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that Russia, "which participated in the Kononov case as a third party, after a comprehensive assessment of the judgment and its legal consequences will draw appropriate conclusions, including regarding the building of our further relations both with the Court and with the Council of Europe as a whole."
But one should not expect any miracles of productivity from the entry into force of the 14th Protocol either. According to estimates by Court experts, the new rules will speed up the process by about 15-20%. Currently, about 40,000 complaints from Russians are awaiting review in the ECHR, and overall, about 120,000 complaints from all Council of Europe member states remain unresolved. Russia, based on last year's results, was among the leaders in the number of lawsuits filed against it in Strasbourg, together with Turkey, Ukraine and Romania.
"The Protocol will allow the Court to devote more attention to cases that raise important human rights issues, and therefore it will be able to better fulfill its tasks," Jagland and Costa said. "The Protocol creates a legal basis for the European Union to accede to the Convention."
The European Union will indeed become a new party to the ECHR and will send its own judge to Strasbourg. By the way, this was one of the reasons why State Duma deputies initially refused to ratify the Protocol. They believed that countries that are members of both the Council of Europe and the European Union would thus get two votes when making decisions. But as stated in the declaration by the ECHR President and the Council of Europe Secretary General, "the EU's accession will further strengthen the protection of human rights in Europe, as the EU legal system will be placed under independent external control with respect to those rights protected by the Convention, in accordance with the Court's interpretation based on its case law."
In addition, the Protocol provides for a simplified procedure for examining complaints for admissibility. Previously, judges decided these issues collectively; now they are delegated to a single judge, whose nationality will not coincide with that of the applicant. However, this only concerns formalities – compliance with deadlines for filing a complaint, exhaustion of all stages of national legal protection. The actual content of the claims will not be examined at this stage.
Until now, all complaints were examined in the ECHR in two instances – first by one of two Small Chambers (seven judges each), and in the event of a review, by the Grand Chamber, consisting of 14 judges. Under the new rules of the ECHR regulation, panels of three judges will be formed. Their competence includes cases for which precedents already exist and therefore do not require such detailed study and painstaking legal analysis as cases examined by the ECHR for the first time.
The Protocol also gives the CMCE more powers to monitor the execution of the Court's judgments, up to applying to the same ECHR for clarification regarding defaulting states. At one time, this provision was also criticized in the Russian parliament, but the Council of Europe assured Russia that such measures would be used only in the most extreme cases.
The same applied to the so-called fact-finding mission. This procedure is also introduced by the Protocol, but will not be endowed with investigative functions and thus substitute for national law enforcement agencies. Its purpose is to familiarize with the actual situation of an applicant who has filed a complaint with the ECHR, if it is impossible to establish this in court, and only with the agreement of the respondent state.