Implementation of the Convention at the national level: the Council of Europe’s cooperation with Supreme and Constitutional Courts

 

Mikhail Lobov, Head of Human Rights Policy and Co-operation Department, Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law (DGI), Council of Europe

 

European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg 8 June 2018

 

Dear President of the Court,

Dear Registrar,

Distinguished judges,

Dear colleagues,

 

I am delighted to address your Forum on behalf of the Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law for the second consecutive year.

I would like at the outset to praise the steady development of our cooperation with the Court’s Registry in promoting a smooth dialogue between all actors of the Convention system.

Indeed, your network, well-known by now as “SCN”, has a clear purpose to enhance the judicial dialogue on Convention matters.

On our end, we in the Council of Europe are also dealing with Convention matters through a dialogue between policy-makers, namely governments and parliaments.

In parallel, however, the Council of Europe is pursuing a wealth of cooperation activities on various Convention issues with national actors, including domestic courts, so we have the judiciary as our privileged interlocutor too.

All these activities converge to a common goal: the effective implementation of the Convention, primarily, at national level.

And since we all contribute to this major goal by our respective means, it is quite natural for us to support SCN – and I should even say that we have been doing it with great enthusiasm since the very beginning.

But I should also note, thankfully, that we are receiving invaluable support from all of you - the Strasbourg Court and your superior courts – in our cooperation activities in the Member States. And even more so, those cooperation activities often involve your superior courts as main partners in our projects. That is why it is a particular pleasure to see you back in Strasbourg on yet another occasion.

Let me give you only two outstanding examples of our synergies, which have been further developed since we met in this room one year ago.

The first one concerns the enhanced cooperation between the Court and our Directorate General in the context of the HELP Programme (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals). HELP, as you know, is a unique pan-European network of judicial training institutions, today the widest training network on the Convention.

The importance of high-quality training for the effectiveness of the Convention can hardly be overstated. HELP’s reputation and success owes a lot to the Court’s and to your national courts’ involvement in designing, adapting and promoting courses in all 47 countries. We are most grateful to all of you for your support.

At the same time, HELP strongly supports day-to-day dialogue between judges on the Convention, not least through offering effective and interactive courses for their in-service training (both classic face-to-face and on-line).

Therefore, HELP has readily supported the SCN Forum over the last two years.
We also greatly appreciate that the Vice-President of the Court, Judge Scicilianos, will address the HELP annual Conference with a key-note speech in two weeks.

And we are looking forward to pursuing the very fruitful cooperation between SCN and HELP for the benefit of both networks which clearly show an example of win-win relationship and mutual reinforcement.

My second example of synergies concerns our cooperation activities with the national superior courts with a view to harmonisation of the Convention-related case-law. There are two major issues involved in this harmonisation process – consistency of the national case-law and the need for early identification of Convention issues by national courts.

Both these issues were tackled in September last year at the Conference in Athens at which the European Court was represented by its Juristconsult, Lawrence Early, and some 20 supreme courts also took part.

I mentioned this new initiative to you at your first meeting and I am glad to be able to report today on the results of the Athens Conference – you will find our comprehensive report on it available in this room.

The main underlying idea behind this process – “harmonisation process” as we commonly call it – is the exchange of good practices between national courts and their case-law departments on the effective ways of early identification of Convention issues and their consistent adjudication (one may also call it “Convention-friendly adjudication”).

Circular communication between national courts is a key component of judicial dialogue on Convention issues. This is an endeavour we would continue to support through our projects for harmonisation of case-law, as a follow up to the Athens conference. And we feel that these “harmonisation projects” may also, either directly or indirectly, serve the same purpose as the one being pursued by the Superior Courts Network.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I could spend more time speaking about our projects because we have plenty of them and they are almost all Convention-related. Nonetheless, I should conclude at this point by thanking the Court and the superior courts represented in this room for your collaboration in the projects implemented by the Council of Europe.

The effectiveness of the Convention nowadays is increasingly contingent on the effective professional communication between all Convention actors, both judicial and non-judicial. I am confident we would continue to develop this communication by our respective means.

Actually, I am convinced that despite the challenges we are presently facing in the Council of Europe, we should find more means to support the SCN, more means to support HELP and our national case-law harmonisation activities. We are looking forward to discussing it further with our Registry colleagues and I am certain we will be able to report further developments at your next meeting, hopefully next year.