ABSTRACT

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is arguably Europe's premiere human rights institution. The period from the mid-1990s to the present has seen a series of advances by the ECtHR to address serious harms facing Roma in Council of Europe (COE) Member States. The Nachova case concerned the killings of two Romani men serving in the Bulgarian military by the Bulgarian police and military forces. An aggrieved Bulgarian government appealed the Chamber judgment to the Court's Grand Chamber, on grounds inter alia that the law applied in the Chamber ruling was not foreseeable. The Convention includes only one explicit right from the international law economic and social rights acquis: the right to education. The Court proceeded to set out the role of statistics in demonstrating discrimination, as well as in shifting the onus of demonstrating that differences of treatment have not constituted discrimination.