Inadmissibility Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: A Critique of the Lack of Reasoning

In 2012, for the first time in many years, the case load of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or ‘the Court’) decreased.1 The single judge formation of the Court managed to dispose of more than 81,000 applications at the admissibility stage in one year, which helped to reduce the overall number of pending cases from 151,600 in the beginning of 2012 to 128,100 cases by the end of the year.2 The Court’s judges and many others will have let out a collective sigh of relief for this, as for a long time it was expected that the Court would (eventually) collapse under the sheer weight of its case-load.3 It now seems as if the mechanisms introduced over the past years to make the system more efficient, might prove to be effective.4 Nevertheless, there is still reason for concern. This is not only so because reducing the pressure of tens of thousands of manifestly inadmissible cases does not yet solve the structural causes of the case load problem of the Court.5 Just as important is that the strong focus on speed and efficiency bears the risk of loss of quality and transparency of judicial reasoning. Recently, this risk was very clearly pointed out by the Human Rights Committee (HRC). In its views in the Achabal case, the HRC found that a case that earlier had been declared inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded by the ECtHR, on the basis that it did not find ‘any appearance of violation of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Convention and its Protocols’, was actually well-founded.6 In its findings regarding the admissibility of the communication, the HRC expressed some serious criticism of the lack of reasoning of the Court’s decision.