Human Rights Court to provide reasons for inadmissibility decisions

A new system for explaining the decisions of single judges in the European Court of Human Rights where applications are rejected as inadmissible is to be brought in by the court.

From this month, the court will provide reasons for inadmissibility decisions given by a single judge. Until now, the applicant or their lawyer simply received a letter informing them that their application had been rejected without any further explanation.

The court said it had adopted that practice in order to tackle a “massive backlog of clearly inadmissible cases”. However, now that the backlog had been cleared, there would be a new procedure which allowed more detailed reasoning to be given. It would still issue “global rejections” in some cases.

The move has been welcomed by the Council of European Bars and Law Societies (CCBE), which commented: “For several years, the CCBE has been asking for this change, highlighting that the absence of motivation of inadmissibility decisions was problematic for lawyers as they were unable to explain the decision to their clients. The CCBE has raised this issue at each one of its bilateral meetings with the court.”