What is the European Court of Human Rights?
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is often confused with European Union institutions, but they are separate bodies with different purposes. The Court is not related to EU membership, trade regulations or the debates you may have heard about in relation to Brexit, though EU member states are also signatories to the Convention it upholds. The ECtHR exists solely to protect human rights across Europe.
The Court was established in 1959 and sits in Strasbourg, France. It interprets and applies the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty that the UK helped to draft in 1950 in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Convention sets out fundamental rights such as the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the right to a fair trial, and freedom of expression.
The ECtHR is run by the Council of Europe, which is a separate organisation from the European Union. The Council of Europe focuses specifically on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Currently, 46 countries are members, including the UK, though this number can change as countries join or are suspended.
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The Court hears cases brought by individuals, organisations or states against any country that has signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights. If you believe a member state has violated your rights under the Convention, you may be able to bring a case, though certain conditions must be met first.
Before applying to the ECtHR, you must have exhausted all available legal remedies in your own country. In the UK, this usually means taking your case through the domestic court system, potentially up to the Supreme Court if necessary. Only after these options have been tried can you apply to Strasbourg.
Applications must be submitted within four months of the final domestic decision. This deadline was reduced from six months in February 2022, so those familiar with the previous rules should note the change. The Court will assess whether your case is admissible before considering the substance of your complaint. Many applications are rejected at this early stage because they do not meet the criteria.
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What Happens When the Court Makes a Ruling?
When the ECtHR finds that a country has violated the Convention, it can require that country to take action. This might include paying compensation to the applicant or making changes to law or policy to prevent similar violations in future.
The Court itself has no direct enforcement power. It cannot compel a government to act or send officials to ensure compliance. Instead, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe monitors whether countries follow the judgments. Member states are expected to comply with rulings as part of their treaty obligations.
In practice, the UK has a strong record of implementing ECtHR judgments, though some decisions have sparked political debate. Some of the Court's rulings have influenced UK law in areas including prisoners' voting rights, privacy protections, and the treatment of asylum seekers. The relationship between the UK and the Court remains a point of political discussion, with ongoing debates about sovereignty and the extent to which Strasbourg judgments should shape domestic policy.
The Judges and Structure
The Court is made up of one judge from each member state. The UK's judge is elected by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from a shortlist of three candidates put forward by the UK government. Judges from all member states are elected through the same process. They serve nine year terms and cannot be re-elected.
Cases may be heard by a single judge, a committee of three judges, a chamber of seven judges, or the Grand Chamber of seventeen judges, depending on their complexity and significance. The Grand Chamber deals with the most serious cases or those that raise important questions about the interpretation of the Convention.
The Court handles thousands of applications each year from across Europe. Processing times can be lengthy, and many cases take several years to reach a final judgment.
a retirement pension .
The mechanic system for receiving the pension is to receive each year ,to sign and notarize it , a certificate that I am alive
For this year I did not received the certificate and they stopped paying the pension .Probably they decided that I am dead .
I am not dead and I tried to clarify the problem with the people in Romania but they did not respond
My experience of European law (France) and the ECHR has turned me from a once europhile to staunch anti EU advocate.
I am pretty convinced, on a larger scale, the EU is just an excuse for the European aristocracies, largest corporate powers and banks to enslave people through bureaucracy, powerlessness and isolation by vague, faceless functionaries.
The ECHR offers nothing to the individual trouble. Everything sounds great and reasonable until you actually want to use it. Then you discover its all just smoke and mirrors to distract individuals from a quiet creep to Orwellian technological dictatorship. Hitler was democratically elected. In soviet Russian everyone was obliged to vote by law. Central Europe (the power brokers of the EU) have always had cultural propensity to central control, dictatorship and enslavement throughout history. The most terrifying development now is that most EU nation government directly access peoples banks accounts with no warning, no legal hearing or recourse, to take money without warning. People think it just happened once in Cyprus. Cyprus was just a test bed. 10 states now, including France and Germany, are regularly doing it. Recent European think tanks now have suggested all personal citizen income should be paid to the tax authorities from where a refund will be repaid to the individual by the government. The EU is the rise of the second soviet union. And they are hell bent on bringing these procedures into the UK.
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I owned a property in France. Some years later, a former owner turned up with a debt lien totally unrelated to me as an individual. After 10 years (yes, 10 years) the issue is still unresolved. Even though I won cases against French state authorities and the judiciary system. The ECHR and court of justice absolutely never enforce their grand words and there is nothing you can do as an individual to fight European courts, state bodies and statutes. It is a ever ending rabbit hole of faceless bureaucrats, vague legal wordings that are designed to be ambiguous and flexibly interpreted. The aim being to beat the individual by attrition and finance. You cannot possibly fight European state bodies when they have unlimited finance via taxation and the printing press (central bank). You will be left trying to get answers and identify responsible officials in some far off land behind the walls of a non descript building guarded by armed police and security barriers. There are British home owners in Spain who are now entering second or third decades of ECHR proceedings with no resolutions regarding their seized properties.
The ECHR and court of justice are charades. UK MUST leave EU now before the creeping tentacles of the EUSSR have enslaved us all and boiled our proverbial frog through negligence and apathy.
The council doesn't want to know and basically given it the red
light to make adjustments and increase the sound when ever they feel like it.
I can hear it while watching TV, I can hear it while in my bedroom,
it's all around sound 24 hours a day.
I am now retired and being brainwashed every hour of my retirement,
there is no way of getting away from this noise.
And yes I did hear it while looking at this property way back in 1998,
but I was working then and only home in the evenings and weekends.
Now I'm sitting here in my house and being blasted through my front window 24 hours a day, it is louder than it was in 1998.
and 2 British families have also lost their properties on the same site yet all of the Turkish families have got their TAPU. This cannot be coincidence and something is fundamentally wrong.
Human Rights are there for a very good reason , and yet you do not have a leg to stand on.......Its just History repeating in different shape and form ............very worrying indeed ................
failed to comply with the conveyance, although, the architect turning moment calculations were approved by the school, from where I purchased the land, which demonstrates, calculations for both 3ft & 6ft retaining boundary wall calculations.
The retaining wall in question, has been in place for over 20 years.
can you find a good lawyer?
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