UK delivers European court reform

The UK’s pledge to reform the European Court of Human Rights has been successfully fulfilled, according to Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke.

Reform of the Court was one of the key priorities for the UK’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe and the foundations of the reforms were laid in a speech given to the Court by Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this year.

In that speech, the Prime Minister outlined the challenges faced by the court as being:

• The Court should be free to deal with the most serious violations of human rights; it should not be swamped with an endless backlog of cases.
• The Court should ensure that the right to individual petition counts; it should not act as a small claims court or Court of Fourth Instance.
• The Court should hold us all to account; it should not undermine its own reputation by going over national decisions where it does not need to.

The agreement will tackle each of these issues by:

• Amending the Convention to include the principles of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation.
• Amending the Convention to tighten the admissibility criteria- so that trivial cases can be thrown out and the focus of the Court can be serious abuses.
• Reducing the time limit for claims from six months to four.
• Improving the selection process for judges.
• Setting out a roadmap for further reform.