The European Court of Human Rights has accused British newspapers of publishing "seriously misleading" reports. One of the main articles which the European Court of Human Rights moved to correct was a 7 October article in the Daily Mail newspaper, which claimed that Strasbourg judges “handed the criminals taxpayer-funded payouts of £4.4million – an average of £22,000 a head.” Its report was followed up by the Daily Telegraph and other British papers.
Click here to read the full Daily Mail article.
The European Court’s registrar Erik Fribergh issued a statement and emailed reporters, saying that the court was "concerned about the frequent misrepresentation of its activities in the British media". He went on to note that "The failure to distinguish between compensation and costs creates the impression that applicants were awarded significantly more compensation than they really were and that the sums indicated were for the applicants' sole benefit".
According to the registrar's statement, the total paid in compensation since 1998 is in the region of £1.7m, less than half the figure calculated by the Daily Mail.
Another issue addressed by the registrar concerned the Court’s judges and their qualifications. Some British media reports had claimed that because the judges are political appointees, many of them were not even legal experts. Fribergh said these claims had no merit. He said that the Court’s judges came from different professional legal backgrounds, but there were no grounds for alleging that they were not legal experts. Fribergh noted that before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe elects judges, the candidate list is vetted by an independent international panel of senior judicial figures. This vetting process is to ensure that the candidates satisfy the Convention criteria that they must “either possess the qualifications required for appointment to high judicial office or be jurisconsults of recognised competence”.
Click here to read a summary of Fribergh’s comments on the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Europe blog.