108

The European Court of Human Rights

Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

7.1 Introduction
There are a few still serving in the Registry of the European Court of
Human Rights (the Court) who began their careers writing drafts for the
Court’s judgments in longhand.1 At that time, the judges outnumbered the
Registry lawyers. Those were the Court’s pioneering days: the judgments
it delivered then established precedent that is studied, and followed, by its
successor institution to the present day. Then, the European Commission
of Human Rights (the Commission) received all applications in conten-
tious cases and decided which were fit to be referred to the Court.2 As
a consequence of the comparatively higher number of cases introduced
before the Commission, the Commission’s Secretariat was necessarily an
organisation on a larger scale: at its maximum, it numbered perhaps sev-
eral dozen members. Its working methods were correspondingly less arti-
sanal than those of the old Court.
As the caseload of the Commission and the Court increased, resulting
from the expansion of the Council of Europe’s membership so as to include
States from Central and Eastern Europe that had shaken off the yoke of dicta-
torship, the decision was taken to replace the two institutions – Commission
and Court – by a single one, the new Court, and merge the secretariat of the
Commission and the registry of the Court into a single Registry. The Court
in its present form came into existence on 1 November 1998.3 Today the
Court comprises 47 judges, served by a Registry numbering approximately

1
The second author is one of them.
2
Articles 25–32 of the European Convention on Human Rights (text of 1950). Hereafter
‘Article’ refers to Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights – ‘the Convention’ –
unless otherwise specified.
3
Date of the entry into force of Protocol No. 11 to the European Convention on Human
Rights, ETS 155.

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650 members at any given time, some two-thirds of whom are lawyers. The
present relationship between the Court’s judges and the Registry is shaped
by two main factors. The first is the sheer size of the Court’s caseload, which
is a function of the number of applications introduced and the Court’s effi-
cacy in dealing with them. The second is the variety of judicial formations
created to deal with it, which is a feature of the system. To these we now turn.

7.2 Caseload
On 31 December 2016,4 there were 79,750 applications pending before
the Court. These varied from the relatively straightforward, suitable for
standardised treatment, to the extremely complex – the latter including
inter-State cases and cases arising from international armed conflicts.5 Over
half of the pending applications concerned only five of the 47 Contracting
States – Ukraine, Turkey, Hungary, Romania and Russia, in that order.
By 31 December 2018 the number of pending applications had
decreased slightly to 56,350.6 The number of applications communicated
to respondent Governments in 2018 was 7,644. The number of applications
decided by a decision or a judgment in 2018 was 42,761, of which 2,738
were decided by judgment delivered; the number declared inadmissible or
struck out was 40,023. By the end of the year 9,750 applications remained
pending at the pre-judicial stage – that is, yet to be considered by a for-
mation of the Court. The number of applications decided was 909.80 for
each one of the Court’s 47 judges. If one considers only the applications
pending at year’s end 2018, there were nearly 1,200 per judge.

7.3 Organisation of the Court and its Registry

7.3.1 The Court
The Court sits in single-judge formations, in committees of three judges,
in Chambers of seven judges and in Grand Chambers of seventeen
judges.7 The Court as a whole is headed by the President. The President’s
tasks include directing the work and administration of the Court and

4
Annual Report of the Court for 2016.
5
Chiragov and Others v. Armenia [GC], no. 13216/05; Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan [GC],
no. 40167/06; Georgia v. Russia (I) [GC], no. 13255/07.
6
Annual Report of the Court for 2018.
7
Article 26 § 1.

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110 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

representing the Court to the outside world. For this reason, the President
is exempted from ordinary casework in Chambers unless he or she is the
national judge in a particular case.8
The basic organisational unit of the Court is the section. There are
five, counting either nine or ten judges (47 being, of course, indivis-
ible by 5 or for that matter any integer), and each with its own Section
President and Vice-President. They are set up for three years.9 Within the
sections the Chambers and the Committees are composed. Their compo-
sition is fixed for a definite period: three years in the case of a Chamber–
corresponding to the life span of its parent section – and one year in the
case of a Committee.10 This helps to ensure, as far as possible, that case-
law developments are not peculiar to particular sections.

7.3.2 The Registry

The official in charge of the Registry is the Registrar of the Court, who is
responsible for the organisation and activities of the Registry under the
authority of the President of the Court.11 The Registrar and one or more
Deputy Registrars – in practice, there is only one Deputy Registrar – are
elected by the Court’s judges.12 The other members of the Registry are
appointed by the Registrar under the authority of the President of the
Court.13 The Court’s expenditure is borne by the Council of Europe.14
Of the Registry’s 650-odd members, some two-thirds are lawyers and
administrative staff involved in case-processing. The remainder include
research lawyers, administrative staff charged with duties other than
case-processing, personnel managers, archivists, information technology
experts, librarians and other support staff such as one expects to find
assisting any major court. The Court’s language department is small, espe-
cially in comparison with that of the European Court of Justice: it num-
bers some 30 linguists, whose duties include not only translation but also
ensuring that the use of the Court’s two official languages – English and
French – in official documents is of an adequate standard.

8
Article 26 § 4 and Rule 9 of the Rules of Court. Hereafter ‘Rule’ refers to a Rule contained
in the Rules of Court unless otherwise specified.
9
Rule 25 § 1.
10
Rule 27 § 2.
11
Rule 17 § 1.
12
Article 25(e).
13
Rule 18 § 3.
14
Article 50.

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The European Court of Human Rights 111

The Registry members charged with day-to-day case-processing are

organised in Section Registries, one attached to each of the five Sections.
The remainder are organised in other departments necessary to provide
the legal and administrative services required by the Court.15 Each Section
Registry is headed by its own Section Registrar and Deputy Registrar.16
The bulk of the case-processing work – which includes assisting the
judges in the work of the Chambers, the committees and the single-judge
formations – is done within the Section Registries. The Section Registries
are further divided into Divisions, which are composed largely according
to State Party to the Convention, the aim being to group together lawyers
and administrative staff with complementary legal and linguistic skills.
A separate administrative entity, the Filtering Section, assists the Section
Registries in managing the flow of incoming new applications. It includes
teams of case-processing lawyers (‘filtering teams’) dealing specifically
with applications directed against four high case-count countries (Russia,
Ukraine, Turkey and Romania), plus administrative support staff. It also
comprises a specialist unit set up for the processing of requests for interim
measures (the Rule 39 Unit, named after Rule 39 of the Rules of Court –
see under ‘Interim Measures’ below). Like the Section Registries, it is
headed by a Registrar. The Grand Chamber has its own Registry, which is
not mentioned separately in the Rules of Court: like the Filtering Section,
it is one of the ‘other departments’ that provide legal and administrative
services. It is comprised of a small number of senior lawyers and adminis-
trative assistants. Its role is essentially a supervisory and coordinating one,
the actual casework being done by lawyers and administrative assistants
within the Sections. A further such ‘other department’ is the Directorate of
the Jurisconsult. The Jurisconsult is a very senior Registry member whose
task it is to assist the Court in ensuring the quality and consistency of its
case law.17 The Directorate of the Jurisconsult includes the Research and
Library Division and the Case-Law Information and Publications Division.

7.4 Involvement of the Registry in the Court’s Work

7.4.1 Filtering
It is not appropriate to use expressions such as ‘standard cases’. Individual
applications18 are lodged by human beings, each of them an individual;

15
Rule 18 § 1.
16
Rule 18 § 2.
17
Rule 18B.
18
Article 34.

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112 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

each case is therefore individual also and deserves to be considered on

its own merits. Nevertheless, not all cases merit the same attention. Some
can be declared inadmissible, or struck out of the list of cases, without fur-
ther examination; others, though well-founded, follow established prec-
edent without raising novel legal issues. The smaller formations of the
Court – the single-judge formations and the committees – deal with cases
of these two categories. Incoming applications are ‘filtered’, as the expres-
sion is – identified by Registry case-processing lawyers as suitable for
decision by a single-judge formation or by a committee, or as requiring
examination by a Chamber if they are not. Some applications may be dis-
posed of administratively at this stage, without judicial involvement; so
may certain requests for interim measures.

7.4.2 Decisions and Judgments

7.4.2.1 Single-Judge Formations
A single-judge formation – one judge deciding alone – may declare an
individual application inadmissible or strike it out of the list ‘where such
a decision can be taken without further examination’.19 Some 33,200
applications met this fate in 2016.20 The Rules of Court provide that
‘[w]here the material submitted by the applicant is on its own sufficient to
disclose that the application is inadmissible or should be struck out of the
list, the application shall be considered by a single-judge formation unless
there is some special reason to the contrary’.21 Single-judge formations
are assisted by (non-judicial) ‘rapporteurs’ – Registry lawyers functioning
under the authority of the President of the Court.22 The Section Registrars
and Deputy Registrars are non-judicial rapporteurs qualitate qua. Others
are chosen from among the most experienced case lawyers and appointed
by the President of the Court.23
Typically, the cases presented to single-judge formations are those: in
which the domestic remedies have not been exhausted or the time limit of
six months from the final domestic decision has not been respected;24 in
which no complaint under the Convention can be detected; or in which

19
Article 27 § 1.
20
Annual Report of the Court for 2018, p. 161.
21
Rule 49 § 1.
22
Article 24 § 2.
23
Rule 18B.
24
Article 35 § 1.

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any complaint made under the Convention would be incapable of leading

to a finding of a violation. If a case is identified as belonging to this cat-
egory, a case lawyer (usually the one who made the identification in the
first place) will prepare a brief note setting out the facts as presented
by the applicant (and as apparent from the documents submitted), the
applicant’s complaints and the reasons for which the application is inad-
missible. This note must be approved by the non-judicial rapporteur
before being forwarded to the single-judge formation for decision. Either
the non-judicial rapporteur or the single-judge formation may seek fur-
ther information from the case lawyer or examine the case file. Either may
decide that the case merits more than superficial examination, whether by
a committee or by a Chamber. In any event, responsibility for the actual
decision to declare the application inadmissible or strike it out is taken by
a judge of the Court, not by a member of the Registry.
The judge sitting as a single-judge formation may not examine any
application against the High Contracting Party in respect of which he or
she has been elected.25 This means that if – as is usually the case – that
judge is not conversant with the language or the legal system of the High
Contracting Party against which the application is directed, a relationship
of trust and cooperation has to exist between him or her and the Registry
lawyers who prepare the cases for decision.

7.4.2.2 Committees and Chambers

If for whatever reason an application is not declared inadmissible by
a single-judge formation, its further fate depends on the decision of
a Judge Rapporteur appointed by the Section President. Unless the
President of the Section directs that the case be considered by a Chamber
or a Committee, the Judge Rapporteur decides whether the application
is to be considered by a Committee or by a Chamber; if there has been
no prior involvement of a single-judge formation, the Rapporteur may
decide that the application should be relegated to the single-judge for-
mation after all.26
Committees of three judges may declare an application inadmis-
sible or strike it out by a unanimous vote where such decision can be
taken without further examination, or alternatively declare it admis-
sible and at the same time give judgment on the merits (and, if appro-
priate, award just satisfaction) if the substantive legal problem under the

25
Article 26 § 3.
26
Rule 49 §§ 2 and 3.

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114 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

Convention (or its Protocols) is already the subject of ‘well-established

case-law of the Court’.27 If the Judge Rapporteur decides that the case
is not one to be considered by a committee, or if the committee is not
unanimous, its admissibility and merits are considered by a Chamber.28
Whether an application is decided by a committee or by a Chamber,
there is no involvement of a non-judicial rapporteur. Instead, it is the
Judge Rapporteur who takes responsibility for presenting the case to the
formation.
In practice, a case-processing lawyer will – perhaps after taking specific
instructions from the Judge Rapporteur – prepare the necessary drafts.
The work of insufficiently experienced case lawyers will be supervised by
more experienced colleagues. In every case, drafts are subject to quality
check by a Section Registrar and Deputy Registrar before being submitted
to the Judge Rapporteur, who may give whatever instructions he or she
thinks fit. In Chamber cases, the judge elected in respect of the High
Contracting Party concerned is required to participate.29 There is no such
requirement in Committee cases. This means that the members of the
Committee may be called to consider a case on the basis of the prepara-
tion provided for them by the Registry.

7.4.2.3 Grand Chamber

Cases may end up before the Grand Chamber either when a Chamber
relinquishes jurisdiction in favour of it or when the Grand Chamber
panel accepts a request for referral.30 In either case, the Grand Chamber’s
internal working procedure is the same. The President of the Grand
Chamber (normally the President of the Court31) designates a Judge
Rapporteur (or in inter-State cases, one or more Judges Rapporteur).32
The drafting lawyer in Grand Chamber cases is chosen from among the
more experienced Registry lawyers and therefore need not be a lawyer
familiar with the language and legal system of the respondent State; if
such is the case, he or she will work in tandem with a colleague who is
and who knows the file well. Notes and drafts of judgments are prepared,
in accordance with the prior instructions of the Judge Rapporteur, by the
drafting lawyers working under the close supervision of a member of the

27
Article 28 § 1.
28
Article 29 § 1.
29
Article 26 § 4.
30
Articles 30 and 43 respectively.
31
Rules 9 § 2 and 24 § 2(a).
32
Rule 50.

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Grand Chamber Registry – a lawyer of great experience (one of those who

began their Registry careers drafting in handwriting) – before they are
presented to the Judge Rapporteur for his or her approval.
The practice is that draft Grand Chamber judgments are first presented
by the Judge Rapporteur to a drafting committee selected from among
judges representing the view of the majority in the Grand Chamber; the
drafting committee’s draft is discussed in detail by the Grand Chamber
and put to the vote. In Grand Chamber cases as in Chamber cases, the
judge elected in respect of the High Contracting Party must take part.33
The other judges of the Grand Chamber, including the Judge Rapporteur,
thus enjoy the benefits of that judge’s knowledge and understanding,
without which they might well be excessively dependent on a single
Registry lawyer who alone had a grasp of the domestic legal system and
language.

7.4.3 Administrative Disposal

In 2018, 19,550 applications were disposed of administratively, without
judicial involvement of any description.34

7.4.3.1 Application forms

Rule 47 of the Rules of Court provides, in essence, that an application
under Article 34 of the Convention shall be made on the application form
provided by the Registry, which must be completed and must be accom-
panied by the documentary evidence. The purpose is to ensure that the
Court is provided with all the information needed in order for there to be
a meaningful examination of whether the admissibility criteria are ful-
filled. At the same time the Court is entitled to establish what constitutes
a valid application: it may therefore require the applicant to provide all
the essential information in an official document which is the basis of
the application and which is sent to the respondent Government if the
case is communicated. Applicants are warned in no uncertain terms of
the consequences of any shortcomings in this regard:
If you decide to apply to the Court, please ensure that your application
complies with Rule 47 of the Rules of Court, which sets out the informa-
tion and documents that must be provided.

33
Rules 9 § 2 and 24 § 2(a).
34
Annual Report of the Court for 2018.

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116 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

Failure to provide any of the information or documents required by Rule
47 §§ 1 and 2 will result in the complaints not being examined by the
Court. It is imperative that all fields in the application form are filled in.35

The application form is available online, with an explanatory notice

that gives detailed guidance.36 Applications received at the Registry are
subjected to detailed scrutiny by a filtering lawyer or an experienced
administrative assistant. Frequent errors include submitting a scanned
or photocopied form without an original signature (a scanned signature
is not accepted); overrunning the maximum number of pages permitted
for setting out the applicant’s complaints; and if the applicant is not a
natural person (as in the case of a company or an NGO with legal per-
sonality), omitting to submit proof that the person signing on the appli-
cant body’s behalf is authorised to do so – in the form, for example, of an
extract from the commercial register. The Registry informs the applicant
that the application, as submitted, does not interrupt the running of the
six-month time limit prescribed by Article 35 § 1 of the Convention; it
is then up to the applicant to re-submit the application in due time if
that is still possible.

7.4.3.2 Interim Measures

Rule 39 of the Rules of Court provides for the possibility of indicating –
in effect, ordering37 – interim measures to be taken aimed at freezing
the situation until the Court can finally dispose of the case before it
by a decision or a judgment. The Court may do so at the request of
a party (usually an applicant) or of its own motion. Interim measures
are applied only rarely: the most typical cases are those in which there
are fears of a threat to life (situation falling under Article 2 of the
Convention) or ill-treatment prohibited by Article 3 of the Convention
(prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment).38 In
practice these are almost exclusively extradition or expulsion cases. In
practice, there are no contentious proceedings before a decision of this
nature is taken – there simply is not enough time. A decision is taken by
a duty judge, the Vice-President of a Section appointed by the President

35
See the Court’s website, www.echr.coe.int/, under ‘Applicants’.
36
Practice direction ‘Institution of proceedings’, issued by the President of the Court. See
www.echr.coe.int/, under ‘Applicants’.
37
Mamatkulov and Askarov v. Turkey [GC], nos. 46827/99 and 46951/99, ECHR 2005-I
38
Information on the Court’s interim measures, including statistics, is available on the
Court’s website, www.echr.coe.int/, under ‘Applicants’.

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The European Court of Human Rights 117

of the Court,39 on the basis of the evidence submitted by the applicant.

The duty judge is assisted by a specialised team of Registry lawyers with
relevant knowledge and experience (the Rule 39 Unit set up within the
Filtering Section).
The Court receives many hundreds of requests for interim measures
from applicants each year: there were 1,540 in 2018 alone. Many do not
fall within the limited scope of application of Rule 39 as it has developed
over the years: for example, requests to order release from detention or
stay the execution of a fine or prison sentence. A filtering lawyer who
receives a request for an interim measure that he or she suspects is out of
scope informs the Registry specialists. With their permission, he or she
may send a written reply informing the applicant accordingly; the letter
is reviewed and signed by a senior Registry colleague. The duty judge is
not involved.40 It is then left up to the applicant whether he or she wishes
to maintain the application, in which case it should be made to meet the
requirements of Rule 47 if it does not do so already.

7.4.4 The Jurisconsult

Until the entry into force of Protocol No. 14 to the Convention in 2010
the Court’s judges, though appointed for a set period, could be re-elected
for further terms. Since then, they are elected for a single period of nine
years without the possibility of re-election.41 Judges whose terms of
office come to an end leave the Court for ever, taking with them their
wealth of knowledge and experience. A recent creation within the Court’s
Registry is the function of Jurisconsult. This is a high-ranking Registry
member whose task is to ‘provide opinions and information, in particular
to the judicial formations and the members of the Court’ with a view to
‘ensuring the quality and consistency of [the Court’s] case-law’.42 Subject
to no predetermined term of office, the Jurisconsult embodies the Court’s
institutional memory. He is assisted by a Deputy.

7.4.4.1 The Directorate of the Jurisconsult

As mentioned, the Jurisconsult is in charge of the Research and Library
Division and the Case-law Information Division, which together

39
Rule 39 § 4.
40
See the General Presentation on interim measures, available on the Court’s website.
41
Article 23 § 1.
42
Rule 18B.

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118 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

constitute the Directorate of the Jurisconsult. The Research and Library

Division carries out legal research at the request of the Judge Rapporteur
in Grand Chamber and (occasionally) Chamber cases. Such research may
concern questions of domestic and international law but also the Court’s
prior case law. The Case-law Information and Publication Division, as its
name suggests, disseminates the Court’s case law both within and out-
side the Court and its Registry. Its media include the searchable database
HUDOC, which is available to the public free of charge; the Case-law
Information Notes, which can be found on the Court’s website; and the
official Reports of Judgments and Decisions, which may be purchased in
paper form from a private publisher but which are also available online.43

7.4.4.2 Case-Law Conflict Prevention

The Jurisconsult’s duties include reviewing the drafts of judgments and
decisions intended to be placed before the five Sections for decision in
order to ensure that the approaches followed by the Sections are consistent
with existing case law of the Court and with each other. The Jurisconsult
brings any discrepancies to the attention of the Sections before they meet
to discuss the cases. The Chambers seized of the cases concerned remain
free to take any decision they deem necessary in response. The Jurisconsult
is assisted by a Deputy and by a team of experienced lawyers drawn from
the Research and Library Division and the Case-law Information Division
and also from case-processing divisions. Members of this team attend the
meetings of the Sections and clarify the Jurisconsult’s observations if so
requested by the Section President.

7.5 Working Parties

Working parties exist within the Court for a variety of purposes. Their remit,
in brief, is to make proposals to improve the Court’s functioning in the
widest sense. Examples are the Standing Committee on the Rules of Court
and the Committee on Working Methods. They are composed of judges
assisted by experienced Registry members; the Registry members may
be lawyers but, depending on the particular expertise required, may also
be drawn from other categories such as administrative support. Working
parties make proposals which are considered by the plenary Court.44

43
See the Court’s website, www.echr.coe.int/, under ‘Case-law’. The publisher is Wolf Legal
Publishers, Oisterwijk, Netherlands.
44
Rule 20.

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The European Court of Human Rights 119

7.6 Conclusion
The days are long gone when the judges of the European Court of Human
Rights and the Members of the European Commission of Human Rights,
the institutions created by the Convention of 1950, could consider every
single case placed before them in detail. The Convention of 1950 did not
mention either the Secretariat of the Commission or the Registry of the
Court. In the years since the entry into force of the Convention,45 the situ-
ation has evolved to a point where the successor body to the two original
institutions, the Court of 1998, is forced to rely to a considerable extent
on its support structure simply to function in its intended role. From this
perspective, Article 24 § 1 of the Convention – ‘The Court shall have a
Registry, the functions and organisation of which shall be laid down in
the rules of the Court’ – merely recognises an existing reality.
It is important to remember that the Court is not in the first place
intended to offer a legal remedy to applicants. Its task is ‘[t]o ensure the
observance of the engagements undertaken by the High Contracting
Parties in the Convention and the Protocols thereto’.46 In those formations
where the Court’s supervisory task is exercised to greatest effect – the
Grand Chamber and the Chambers – the involvement of the judges is
therefore greatest, and the role of the Registry correspondingly more sup-
portive. On the level of dispensing individual justice, the Registry does
much to shield the Court’s judges from the day-to-day drudgery of case-
work. The administrative disposal of applications for failure to comply
with formal requirements is to be seen in this light. Such delegation of
the duty to ensure compliance with formal requirements, together with
the attendant authority, is not unique to this Court: the European Patent
Office, for example, makes very similar use of ‘formalities officers’.47
Where formal requirements are met, however, the admissibility and
merits of applications are in all cases decided by the Court, whatever the
judicial formation. Indeed, all decisions that are binding on Contracting
Parties – including the indication of provisional measures – are given

45
The Convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. The Commission and Court were
established in 1955 and 1959 respectively.
46
Article 19.
47
Convention on the Grant of European Patents (European Patent Convention), Article 19;
Implementing Regulations to the Convention on the Grant of European Patents, Rules
41, 57 and 58; European Patent Office, Guidelines for Examination, Part A, Chapter III,
section 16.1.

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120 Ledi Bianku and Peter Kempees

by at least one duly elected judge. In simple terms, the Registry is indis-
pensable to the Court. The success of the Convention system depends on
public confidence in the independence and impartiality of the Court, and
therefore on the perception that a relationship of trust exists between the
Court and its Registry – which in turn depends in no small measure on
the Registry’s professionalism.

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