Understanding how countries react to and enforce international court decisions
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) hears petitions from individuals against 46 Member States(opens in new window) of the Council of Europe. If individuals are successful in proving a human rights violation, ECtHR may award them damages for the treatment suffered or ask the state to undertake other measures. Over half of these decisions – almost 10 000 judgments – remain unenforced. Across the 46 states, non-compliance with ECtHR judgments remains a major problem.
When are judgments obeyed?
The HRNUDGE(opens in new window) project, supported by the European Research Council(opens in new window), analysed 25 000 ECtHR judgments and followed these judgments into the states. Project researchers then carried out a social network analysis and a computer simulation to better grasp the dynamics of compliance. “We found that because so many judgments are not complied with, this undermines ECtHR authority and out of concern that more judgments will be unenforced, the Court allows countries to settle claims,” explains HRNUDGE principal investigator Veronika Fikfak(opens in new window), professor of human rights and international law at University College London.
The case for settlements
The analysis uncovered 13 000 such settled cases, in addition to the thousands already analysed. This means that settlements represent a third of ECtHR case law. “As such settlements do not appear anywhere on the ‘record’ of the state, they allow states to proceed unhindered by their behaviour and avoid condemnation from the international community,” says Fikfak. “This shows how ECtHR has reacted to the lack of compliance and threats from states, by effectively creating for them another avenue to ‘get rid of’ cases.” The researchers showed that non-enforcement of judgments is a problem in only a few states, not across the system as a whole. They also revealed that it fluctuates and depends on the priorities of governments at specific times. Most of the time, states are unable to enforce judgments because of a lack of knowhow, but through appropriate mentoring, compliance can be achieved.
Novel approach to ensure enforcement of international judgments
Russia, expelled from the Council of Europe in 2022, is one of the worst compliers of ECtHR judgments. Thousands of decisions against it are unenforced. The researchers investigated what happens to the judgments that ECtHR issued against Russia and specifically what happens to the almost EUR 3 billion worth of compensation and/or damages that Russia owes to victims of human rights violations. They looked into ways of forcibly enforcing such decisions through domestic courts and against Russian assets in foreign countries. Fikfak testified about this approach before the Council of Europe’s Committee of Legal Advisers on Public International Law in Strasbourg. The HRNUDGE team also presented its findings in Strasbourg to the secretariat responsible for monitoring the states’ behaviour. The expectation is that the proposed set of recommendations will be incorporated into its work. These include building mentoring relationships with states, burden sharing in the compliance process between different bodies and organs within the state, as well as recommendations that the secretariat has to insist on holding states to account and having high expectations when it comes to enforcing judgments. “If we want good human rights protection across Europe, we cannot lower the bar of what we expect from states,” concludes Fikfak.
