Montenegro is faced with a constant increase of constitutional appeals before the Constitutional Court and individual applications before the ECtHR against Montenegro, followed by the increased percentage of those which are declared manifestly ill-founded or otherwise inadmissible. Over the last three years, the number of applications concerning Montenegro, which have been declared inadmissible or struck out, has increased considerably.
A better understanding of the procedural demands of the Strasbourg procedure will contribute to reducing the number of inadmissible applications, which will alleviate the burden on the Strasbourg Court. At the same time, it may lead to a lowering of the percentage of the constitutional appeals before the Constitutional Court, which are rejected on procedural grounds due do the similarities between those mechanisms.
In this context, a training session for lawyers was organised on 17 and 18 March 2017 in Podgorica, under the joint initiative of the EU/CoE Horizontal Facility Action “Fighting ill-treatment and impunity and enhancing the application of the ECtHR case-law at the national level”, the HELP in the Western Balkans and Turkey project and the Bar Association of Montenegro.
The training brought together around 120 practicing lawyers and provided for a forum to discuss with international and national experts the relevance of admissibility criteria in applications submitted to the Strasbourg and the Constitutional Courts. The participants had the opportunity to attend theoretical and practical sessions on the procedural prerequisites for lodging and deciding on a constitutional complaint. Furthermore, a representative from the ECtHR moderated training sessions on the admissibility criteria and the content of an individual application, as well as on the reasons for inadmissibility. The HELP course on admissibility criteria was also presented to the participants.
