Publications

Dynamics of Cases Litigated Against Georgia in the European Court of Human Rights through the Prism of Court’s Institutional Evolution

The document was first published in December 2022. It is the updated version, including the data for 2022.

The relationship between Georgia and the European Court of Human Rights counts for 23 years. During this term, thousands of complaints were lodged against Georgia. The number of applications was notable from the first years of the ratification of the Convention and reached its peak in 2008. However, since 2013, compared to previous years, the number of filed complaints has sharply decreased, which provoked great curiosity among various actors within the country.

As the reasons for the change in the number of complaints filed against Georgia have not been analysed, with the current knowledge, it is impossible to talk about the causal relationships. Therefore, the research aims to study the factors affecting the dynamics of cases against Georgia in the European Court. Additionally, a separate chapter is devoted to exploring the Court's Institutional Evolution and reforms implemented in the European Court, which directly impacted the dynamics of cases in the Court.

The research proves that the dynamics of the cases against Georgia in the European Court are determined by endogenous (including the state efforts carried out at different times in the field of human rights protection) and exogenous factors, where the latter is substantial. One of the most visible exogenous factors is the Russian-led campaign after the war in 2008, bringing more than 3,300 complaints against Georgia (almost 50% of the complaints filed since Georgia's ratification of the Convention). However, they were struck out or declared inadmissible by the Court in later years.

See the attached file for the entire document.


Author(s)

Tamar Ketsbaia