INTERIGHTS, the international centre for the legal protection of human rights, has produced a series of legal manuals to help practitioners understand ECHR jurisprudence. There are manuals available on Articles 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 11, and the manual on Article 2 has recently been updated. Each manual includes a theoretical section on ECHR standards and a compilation of ECtHR case law citations.
Click here to access the INTERIGHTS manuals.
Another improved resource for practitioners is the ECtHR database. The court has recently updated its web-facing search engine to make 90,000 court documents easier to interrogate. Until June, the search engine used by the Court’s Hudoc website was functionally limited, but has now been vastly improved and allows for more focused searches.
Click here to read an article on the ECtHR web search upgrades.
In other European human rights news, the EU Foreign Affairs Council has adopted the EU strategic framework for human rights and democracy and the EU action plan for human rights and democracy. These plans outline the aim of the EU to better integrate human rights in all areas of its external policies and to develop an action-oriented strategy to achieve this goal. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) believes that the package should strengthen the coherence and consistency of the EU’s voice and interaction with third countries in the human rights field. It also mentions the potential for trade facilities to be conditioned with human rights improvements. FIDH says that the achievements and challenges brought about by the package would include a strengthened EU voice on human rights, a more efficient, effective and coherent policy and a policy with potentially significantly more leverage.
Click here to read about the new EU human rights policy.