Greece among nine states ignoring at most the ECtHR judgments

The PACE report and resolution have revealed the lack of political will of those member States including Greece of the Council of Europe to fully and rapidly implement the ECtHR judgments

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted on 30 September 2015 the report and resolution based on the report on the implementation by member States of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In the report by the Dutch parliamentarian Klaas de Vries, it is noted about 11,000 judgments of the Court have still not been implemented by the States concerned by the end of 2014 and almost 80% of the backlog came from only nine states including Greece having 558 cases which have not been implemented by the Greek authorities. The report has identified in those nine member States deep-seated structural problems which were leading to non-implementation of the Court judgments. The main problems include excessive length of domestic judicial proceedings, unlawful and poor detention conditions, ill treatment by law-enforcement officials and lack of an effective remedy.

The rapporteur de Vries states the number of cases requiring oversight by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has been on the rise since 2006, making it more and more difficult for the supervisory body to effectively exercise its functions. The PACE urges therefore in the recommendation based on the report the Committee of Ministers to make use of the new “infringement procedure”, introduced in 2010, which allows the Court to rule on whether a member State has breached its obligation to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights.

Concerning freedom of association of the Turkish minority of Western Thrace, the report refers to the three judgments of the ECtHR which have still not been implemented by Greece. In the cases of Bekir-Ousta and others v. Greece (application no. 35151/05, judgment of 11 October 2007), Emin and others v. Greece (application no. 34144/05, judgment of 27 March 2008) and Tourkiki Enosi Xanthis and Others v. Greece (application no. 26698/05, judgment of 27 March 2008), the Court held unanimously that there had been a violation by Greece of the Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Greek authorities had dissolved the Turkish Union of Xanthi due to the word “Turkish” in its name and refused to register the Cultural Association of Turkish Women of the Region of Rodopi and Evros Prefecture Minority Youth Association on the grounds that whereas the name the first association had indicated the word “Turkish”, the title of the latter had been confusing due to the word “minority”. According to a statement dated 5 January 2015, the Court will rehear the concerning three cases listed under “Bekir-Ousta group”

During the report’s preparation process, the Federation of Western Thrace Turks (ABTTF) had met the member of the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights Klaas de Vries in Strasbourg and provided him with information on the problems faced by the Turkish minority of Western Thrace in the field of freedom of association in Greece. Moreover, ABTTF had organized on 25 April 2013 a side event on “the right to freedom of association of the Turkish minority of Western Thrace and (non-) implementation by Greece of ECtHR judgments”.

The full text versions of the PACE report on the implementation of ECtHR judgments and related resolution and recommendation based on the report are available at:
http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=22005&lang=en
http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-EN.asp?fileid=22197&lang=en
http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=22198&lang=en