Guidelines on taking a case to the ECtHR

The UK Human Rights Blog has published a series of articles which give an overview of how to satisfy the requirements of taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights.

 

The first post, written by Rosalind English, explains how to “exhaust local remedies” in order to then apply to the Strasbourg court. This requirement is set out in Article 35 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that, “the Court may only deal with the matter after all domestic remedies have been exhausted, according to the generally recognised rules of international law, and within a period of six months from the date on which the final decision was taken”. The principle of this requirement is that a State should be afforded the opportunity to address complaints before the European Court is called upon to make a decision. This aspect of “subsidiarity” is discussed in English’s blog post, as well as the requirement of availability and effectiveness of a remedy in the domestic system.

 

 

Another post by Rosalind English considers Article 35’s “six months” requirement. She says that there is difficulty discerning when the “final decision” was made and when the clock begins to run. In this post she gives an overview of the case law on the topic and notes issues such the circumstances that may persuade the court to suspend the six month period.

 

 

Paul Harvey and Pamela McCormick have written a piece which gives more information about admissibility criteria for the Strasbourg court . The article gives an overview of how the criteria are applied to UK cases, and then provide some further guidelines on submitting applications.