60th Anniversary of the European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is celebrating 60 years since it was founded in 1959, based on the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. On the occasion of its jubilee, a conference was held in April 2019 at the Faculty of Law of the university of Ljubljana, at which high state representatives and other legal professionals participated. Conference put particular emphasis on the protection of human rights, the rule of law and respect of judicial decisions. Member states have to respect the ECtHR’s decisions and this choice is not in arbitrary hands of states although they argued for the opposite position. Slovenia has realised that and took a broad range of measures aimed at enabling national judges to be adequately informed about the European case law by using communication channels and translating judgements into Slovene. The key point is to keep trust and confidence enjoyed by the judiciary amongst the public, and awareness of the relevance of human rights. On the other side, the number of cases that have been allocated to the ECHR seems to be problematic. Every case represented a challenge at the beginning of the court’s work but nowadays, the main challenge is to control the caseload. The annual caseload has been growing rapidly in the last twenty years and demonstrates a significant work that has been done by 47 European judges and other personnel.

Key words: European Court of Human Rights, European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the rule of law, respect of the judicial decision and the case law, caseload