A two-day study visit to the Council of Europe and European Court of Human Rights was organised for a group of ten representatives of the Constructional Court, judges and state advisors, as part of the Action for “Increasing judicial capacity to safeguard human rights and combat ill-treatment and impunity” under the European Union/Council of Europe Horizontal facility Programme.

This activity aimed at getting in-depth knowledge about the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”) and the European Court of Human Rights in relation to latter’s admissibility and filtering criteria and respective case-law on the Articles 9, 10, 11 and 14 from the Convention. The study visit aimed at enhancing the capacities of the Constitutional Court to better apply the European Court of Human Rights standards when dealing with individual application in their daily work. They also had opportunity to get familiar with the work of other Council of Europe departments, such as the Department of execution of judgments, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights and the HELP Programme.

In addition, the participants had an opportunity to attend a Grand Chamber hearing at the European Court of Human Rights, namely the case of Nait-Liman v. Switzerland (application no. 51357/07) assessing right to access to court under Article 6 of the Convention. Finally, the participants had a courtesy visit to the Permanent Representation of the “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" to the Council of Europe.