EU: A treaty amending the European Convention on Human Rights is due to be adopted at the two-day meeting of the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers which ends today in Strasbourg.
The amendments are aimed at reforming the European Court of Human Rights, which is no longer able to cope with the volume of cases coming before it.
The caseload has increased 118 per cent since 1998, with the number of applications lodged in 2003 running at 39,000. The expansion of the Council of Europe to 45 states, with a population of about 800 million people, has resulted in an explosion of cases and long delays in cases being heard and concluded.
According to the Council of Europe, the main underlying difficulty is the failure of many states to guarantee rights under the Convention, and to offer effective remedies to those whose rights are violated.
In addition, some 80 per cent of the cases are inadmissible. Others are repetitive, in that they arise from the same structural defect in certain states. Failure to rectify such defects then gives rise to yet more cases.
The Committee of Ministers wants to raise public awareness of rights under the Convention. It is also proposing new procedures to deal with inadmissible cases, where a decision on admissibility would be taken by one judge rather than three, as at present.
A new admissibility criterion is also proposed, where an application could be deemed inadmissible if the applicant had not suffered a significant disadvantage. This would only apply if "respect for human rights" did not require the court to go fully into the case.
The Committee of Ministers is also proposing a protocol giving it new powers to compel compliance with a judgment of the court. This would allow it to bring its own proceedings against a state, if it decided to do so by a two-thirds majority.
Amnesty International has broadly welcomed the proposals, but warned that the new admissibility proposal is too vague and could lead to arbitrary decisions.
It also criticised a proposal to allow a judge elected from the respondent state to sit on the panel hearing expedited cases.