Enhancing the capacity of Serbian lawyers to lodge applications before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR): HELP kick-off meeting

In the framework of the HELP in the Western Balkans and Turkey project, the course on Admissibility criteria in applications submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was launched on 25 March 2017 for a selected group of 22 Serbian lawyers.  The group of participants was composed of lawyers, including representatives from the Law Faculty of Belgrade, Belgrade Center for Human Rights, CHRIS Network and Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM).

The kick-off meeting was organised to gather the participants in the course, which will be implemented through the HELP e-learning platform for 12 weeks. Participants could attend a presentation to the HELP Programme as well as to the available resources on different human rights topics.

Jeremy McBride, barrister and member of the Working Group in charge of the development of the course, provided participants with a detailed introduction to the admissibility criteria. Participants could benefit from a in-depth explanation of the different grounds of inadmissibility (manifestly ill-founded; incompatibility ratione personae, ratione loci, ratione temporis, ratione materiae; anonymity; substantially the same; abuse of right; non-exhaustion of domestic remedies; 6 months rule; no significant disadvantage) along with the most important and recent case law from the Strasbourg Court.

The HELP national tutor, Dušan Ignjatović, focused on the situation in Serbia by highlighting the problem of the exhaustion of domestic remedies at the national level. The national tutor will be adapting the course to the national context and moderating the course via the HELP platform.

The HELP course on Admissibility criteria in applications submitted to the ECtHR is composed of 5 modules (overview and procedure; incompatibility, anonymity, substantially the same, abuse of rights; non-exhaustion of domestic remedies, six months rule, no significant disadvantage; manifestly ill-founded; striking out and completing the form). The course has already been implemented in Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, Russian Federation and Turkey. A cross-boarding course for Russian speaking participants has been launched in 2016 in co-operation with the Human Rights House Network.

The course in English is available here to any user after the creation of an account in the HELP platform.