European Court of Human Rights ....... a VIP box of cardsharks? You betcha!

The video is in German. What he is basically saying is:

Our judiciary is incurably degenerate. It is an expiring soviet model where first-instance procedural truths from the higher courts to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) are copied / pasted without plausibility testing.

One apparatchik controls the other. Nothing clever can come out of that. Of the 60 to 70,000 complaints that end up in Strasbourg every year, 90 to 98% are unfounded with a half-page text module. The complaints are not even read. Then they are destroyed.

Case Switzerland: On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights, our Foreign Minister Didier BURKHALTER congratulated himself on the fact that Strasbourg only approved 1.6% of all claims from Switzerland (Bundesrat report of 19.11.2014). Wanted to say: We have the perfect constitutional state. The whole world believes that.
(Google translate)

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Here is an excerpt from the excellent paper 'Significantly Disadvantaged? Shrinking Access to the European Court of Human Rights' authored by Dinah L. Shelton, Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law Emeritus
Address:
2000 H Street, NW
Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

I have meanwhile read quite some papers with particular view on these so-called Single-Judges decisions and I have to say, without any intent to flatter her, Dinah Shelton's paper is the most outspoken. Here goes:

"As states do not like to be found in violation of their human rights obligations, it is not surprising that they would seek to limit admissibility, even (or especially) in respect to meritorious claims.

Currently, the Registry undertakes an initial evaluation of applications. A nonjudicial rapporteur from the Registry decides whether the application should be assigned to a single judge, a Committee or a Chamber, and assists the single judges, transmitting the lists of cases deemed inadmissible to the judges for approval. The President of the Court decides on the number of judges designated to sit as single judges and appoints them to serve for a period of one year. The Rules of Court provide that where the material submitted by the applicant is ‘on its own’ sufficient to disclose that the application is inadmissible or should be struck out of the list, it is to be considered by a single judge unless there is some special reason to act to the contrary. The single judge may declare inadmissible or strike out the application without further examination or appeal, notifying the applicant of the decision by letter. As Cameron has noted and judges on the Court have confirmed in discussions with the author, the lists transmitted electronically to the single judges contain only one or two sentence summaries of each matter recommended for dismissal, identifying the right being invoked; the judges do not see the applications  (26) and a few have complained of feeling that they are expected to ‘rubber-stamp’ the decisions of the Registry. Once the application is rejected, the author of it is sent a form letter so indicating, without explanation or reasoned decision, simply stating that ‘taking ac- count of all the elements in its possession, and to the extent that it is able to evaluate the allegations formulated’, the Court sees no reason to proceed.

(26) Cameron, ‘The Court and the Member States: Procedural Aspects’ in Andreas Follesdal et al. (eds),Constituting Europe: The European Court of Human Rights in a National, European and Global Context (2013) 25 at 33. Lack of access to the applications is understandable because the single judge is unlikely to comprehend the many different languages of the applications.
(27) The problem of a ‘hidden judiciary’ of secretariat lawyers making the actual decisions is not unique to the European system. Cameron notes that this can create problems of integrity when the Registry is partly staffed with temporarily seconded personnel paid for by individual states: see ibid. at 34."

There is more good stuff in her paper.

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Here are some comments of victims under the Single-Judges regime.

What a disgrace these single-judge decision are and here.

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ECHR Judge Potocki's decision reeks to high heaven and is an insult to any democratic being! The ECHR is covering a criminal. But what else would you expect from fucking Europe?!

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