Conference/workshop on “the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the member countries”

Tirana, 8 october 2012

Mr President, Your Excellencies, dear colleagues,

It is a great privilege and an honour for me to participate in this Workshop and to tell you about the work the Council of Europe is doing to support its member states as regards the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights at national level.

I am particularly pleased to discuss this issue in Tirana, bearing in mind the long-standing cooperation between the Albanian institutions and the Council of Europe in giving effect to the Convention at the national level. As you may know, Albania is currently one of the pilot countries for various initiatives under the European Programme for Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (the HELP Programme). It is about this programme that I would like to direct my remarks today.

In the 2012 Brighton Declaration, the High Contracting Parties explicitly expressed their determination to ensure effective implementation of the Convention at the national level by “providing appropriate information and training about the Convention in the study, training and professional development of judges, lawyers and prosecutors” (paragraph 9.vi of the Brighton Declaration). The overall objective of the HELP Programme is precisely to support member states to achieve this result.

Training on the European Convention on Human Rights should be seen as providing both an immediate contribution to improving the skills and knowledge among legal professionals, and as making a longer-term investment towards reducing the number of cases currently being brought before the European Court of Human Rights, in line with the principle of subsidiarity.

Undoubtedly, judges and prosecutors in Council of Europe member states do make some references to the European Convention on Human Rights in their decisions and judgments. However, it is also clear that, in far too many situations, the Convention and the case law of the Strasbourg Court have not been taken into consideration in situations to which it was clearly relevant. For example, this concerns the lack of effective investigations of allegations of ill-treatment or the lack of scrutiny of prosecutors’ decisions on pre-trial detention, and well as cases of excessive length of pre-trial detention.

Of course, I am very well aware that, for many national judges and prosecutors, the task of applying the case law of the Strasbourg Court can appear daunting because the principles of interpretation might seem alien to some national legal traditions. This appearance can equally discourage lawyers from making use of Convention-based arguments in their submissions.

It is exactly this difficulty that makes the provision of professional training on Convention standards and the translation and dissemination of the case law of the Strasbourg Court essential. Without them, it would be very hard that proper account of the Convention and its case law is taken in the deliberations and decision-making of national courts.

This is where the HELP Programme comes into play. Since its creation as a response to CM Rec (2004) 4 on the European Convention on Human Rights in university education and professional training, the HELP Programme has assisted national training institutions to incorporate the standards of the Convention into their curricula for both the initial and the continuing professional training provided to judges and prosecutors. This constitutes a very important step forward. The HELP Programme was for some time limited to judges and prosecutors of 12 target countries but I am glad to report that, since January 2012, its reach has been enlarged to include all 47 member states and also to cover lawyers, as well as judges and prosecutors.

In this connection, I would like to recall that the Council of Europe has been providing training on the Convention in a number of its member states for well over a decade. Indeed, for a long time, in some countries, the only training provided on the Convention was that which was organised by the Council of Europe. Happily, this situation now belongs truly to the past and each member state has a stable national training institution entrusted with the training of its country's judges and prosecutors. Some of these national training institutions were established with the assistance of the Council of Europe.

A similar approach will be pursued as regards the training of lawyers, working in co-operation with the Bar Associations and other competent national institutions. The ultimate goal is that the Convention should be incorporated into the compulsory curriculum for the legal education of all legal professionals, which still is not the case everywhere, in particular when it comes to continuous education.

The HELP Programme has developed a specific training methodology that is used transversally in all capacity-building activities of the Council of Europe. National institutions are encouraged to make use of the wide range of Convention training tools and resources that have being developed under the HELP Programme. These include: training manuals, thematic handbooks, standard curricula, course outlines, presentations and case studies, as well as whole courses on different articles and themes. These tools have been translated into many national languages and are freely available on-line, on the HELP website. This website can be used for self-training, assisting legal professionals in their own capacity development endeavours. It also contains tools for national Convention trainers which they can use to train their peers.

The address of the website is www.coe.int/help, which you can find in the leaflets which have been distributed. Moreover, for those interested among you I am available during the coffee break to give a brief demonstration of the main features of the HELP website.

The HELP Programme has established a large peer-to-peer European Human Rights Training Network among national training institutions, Bar Associations, relevant international professional associations and the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe. This Network exists in order to exchange good practices and experiences among those responsible for initial and in-service training of legal professionals.

In June 2012, under the auspices of the Albanian Chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, a HELP Network Conference was organised in Strasbourg. This was a unique opportunity to bring together representatives of national training institutions and Bar Associations from all member states. The training needs of the different countries, the impact, the follow-up and the sustainability in the long-term of the HELP Programme were discussed.

The conclusions that were reached have led to the formulation of a road map for the future of the HELP Programme. I have just time enough to mention a couple of them.

Firstly, the use of the national language was identified by the Conference participants as more than just an added value: it is in fact a mandatory requirement to ensure both the effective training of legal professionals and an adequate transfer of information on the HELP Programme. New initiatives have being undertaken to address this request.

These include the making available from today of a new version of the HELP website. This version remains a work in progress but we really wished to present it to you at the workshop. The website now includes some pilot “HELP national pages” written entirely in a number of the languages of Council of Europe in addition to English and French. These pages are directed at a group of 12 target pilot countries, including Albania, for which some “HELP Focal Points” have also been appointed. These Focal points are national experts, who co-operate with the national training institutions and Bar Associations in the provision of all necessary information about HELP resources for national legal professionals. The Focal Points are also responsible for publishing on the website any news about national training initiatives and relevant national jurisprudence that makes use of Convention-based arguments.

Secondly, the HELP Conference recommended that best practices are more systematically shared. Thus, another novelty is a page of HELP News in English for all 47 member states which is intended to provide a more general overview of all training initiatives on the ECHR in the different member states.

Thirdly, the need to mainstream human rights into the training for legal professionals was underlined. As a result, various curricula and distance-learning courses have been, and continue to be, developed to ensure that the training needs of different countries and professional groups are being met. The first ones concern a wide range of topics, namely, Family Law and Human Rights, Alternative measures to detention and the overcrowding of prisons, Antidiscrimination, Migration and Human Rights, Court Management and Children Rights. The aim is for these courses to be addressed to small groups of legal professionals, selected by the competent national institutions. A national tutor will be in charge to adapt the master curriculum in English to the national needs, using the national language to interact with the participants. Ideally, the courses developed will become part of the mandatory training of the respective professional group, whether in the framework of initial or in-service training.

For the training of lawyers, general programmes covering all aspects of the Convention continue to be very useful. However, particular attention has also to be paid to the major problem of a very large number of inadmissible applications being submitted to the European Court of Human Rights.

In the framework of the HELP Programme, and as a follow-up to the Interlaken Declaration, a specific project has thus been developed on “Enhancing the capacity of lawyers to comply with the admissibility criteria in applications submitted to the European Court of Human Rights”. This project currently focuses on 6 pilot countries, again including Albania, and includes distance learning courses and national guidelines on this very topic. Some national experts have been appointed as HELP Info Points for their countries. They will provide lawyers and potential applicants with information on admissibility criteria. They will also be entrusted with screening applications to the Strasbourg Court, with the objective of discouraging the submission of manifestly inadmissible applications and ensuring that well-founded ones do not fail because of a failure to fulfil the admissibility requirements.

I have not mentioned until now that the HELP Programme is funded by the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Trust Fund. This generous support by the Fund has really been fundamental but it has to be said that the resources available for the Programme are still limited. It is for this reason that some of the new initiatives which I previously mentioned are currently restricted to just a limited number of countries. In order to be able to respond to all the needs of the national training institutions as regards training on the Convention, additional resources are clearly needed. Of course, the commitment to and ownership of the HELP Programme on the part of national institutions will also be needed to ensure its very sustainability.

The HELP Programme has undoubtedly brought about some impressive results but the impression we have in the Council of Europe is that it has nonetheless remained until recently a well guarded secret. This is happily not the case anymore. The Council of Europe is determined to use the HELP Programme to enhance the effectiveness of the training on the Convention in its member states for legal professionals. Ensuring that this occurs will require several things to be put in place and I will just give a couple of examples.

To start with, a proper assessment of the needs of the professions and of the organisational and institutional capacity within the national training institutions and the Bar Associations has been undertaken in order to be sure that the Council of Europe’s contribution is truly useful and to the point. The establishment of units in charge of coordinating human rights training in each institution would facilitate this exercise and would also allow for better coordination with other possible partners who also provide training for legal professionals.

Secondly, it has become clear that peer-to-peer exchanges with a harmonised methodology, adapted to each country’s legal traditions and needs would be the best way of increasing the impact of human rights capacity building for legal professionals. This is what the HELP Programme aims to achieve.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In conclusion, I would like to come back to the Brighton Declaration which confirmed that the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights at the national level is essential in order to ensure the full and effective protection of human rights and that the capacity of all legal professionals to apply and implement the Convention in national proceedings will only be enhanced through the provision of adequate training.

I trust that the HELP Programme will effectively contribute to the efforts of all Council of Europe member states in undertaking this challenging and crucial task.