ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether the future of the European Court of Human Rights has recently been compromised by the Court’s apparent deference to three states which have at different times perpetrated gross violations of human rights in the context of internal armed conflict: Turkey, Russia and the United Kingdom. More than one commentator has raised the question whether the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) were ‘politically motivated’. The ECtHR held that the newspaper had not incited terrorism: in fact, it had used the words ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdish’, which Turkey considered to be ‘separatism’, and therefore terrorism. The Irish government made history by taking the UK government to the ECtHR – the first ‘interstate case’. On 6 February 2013 the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre lodged a ‘collective complaint’ to the ECtHR on behalf of several of the affected civil society organisations, and altogether there are 49 applications to the ECtHR.
