Case Watch: Speeding up Human Rights Justice in Europe

In our blog feature, “Case Watch,” staff of the Open Society Justice Initiative provide quick-hit analysis of recent notable court decisions that relate to their work to advance human rights law around the world.

The European Court of Human Rights currently has a backlog of over 140,000 cases that are waiting to be considered. This large number has led to complaints of delayed justice and calls for a more efficient system.

In a bid to address this fundamental challenge, the court has started a pilot judgment procedure that seeks to deal with systemic or structural human rights problems at the national level, so that the Court does not need to consider large sets of cases arising out of the same issue.

At the end of March, the Court closed the first of these pilot cases and struck out a number of other complaints related to the same Polish rent control laws. So can the pilot procedure really streamline the Court while preserving justice?

Rent-control laws in Poland have historically prevented landlords from charging what they would consider adequate rent. In June 2006 in the case of Hutten Czapska v. Poland the Grand Chamber of the court found that this was a violation of the right to property under Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Because this problem had already generated many similar cases, the Court declared this case a pilot judgment and so suspended their consideration of all related cases until the problem was resolved.

Following the ruling, Poland responded by introducing a compensation scheme to comply with the judgment, giving landlords a reasonable chance to raise rents. But the 96 applicant landlords in one of the suspended cases, The Association of Real Property Owners in Łódź v. Poland, argued that this new compensation system did not adequately address their complaints, because Polish law continued to restrict their ability to terminate leases and evict non-paying tenants.

The Court disagreed, finding that the new scheme provided “just satisfaction” that remedied the human rights violation, as it allowed landlords to make a “decent profit”. The Court recognized that Poland had inherited from the communist regime an acute shortage of affordable flats, and had to balance the competing interests of landlords and tenants. Poland had introduced large-scale changes in policy and legislation, and some restrictive rules were inevitable while those new policies took effect. The Court then struck out the 24 suspended cases, on the basis that the reforms had resolved the complaints.

The implementation of human rights judgments is an ongoing challenge that the Justice Initiative has explored in detail in a study, “From Judgment to Justice”. The development of the pilot judgment process is an important step by the Court to address this challenge, and this first case provides useful guidance on the process. It also illustrates some of the benefits and sacrifices that may result from the efficiencies of the pilot judgment procedure.

The solution executed by the State does not have to fully satisfy all claimants of related cases, so long as the Court is satisfied that the actions taken by the State were sufficient to eliminate the violations of the European Convention on Human Rights