TACKLING THE STRUCTURAL DEFICIENCIES AT THE ECHR'S LEVEL THROUGH THE PILOT-JUDGMENT PROCEDURE
TACKLING THE STRUCTURAL DEFICIENCIES AT THE ECHR'S LEVEL THROUGH THE PILOT-JUDGMENT PROCEDURE

Summary/Abstract: The pilot judgment procedure is an ingenious tool of the European Court for Human Rights to deal with the situations when it receives a significant number of applications deriving from the same root cause. Thus, the Court it may decide to select one or more cases from them for priority handling, and in dealing with the case(s) selected, the Court will seek to arrive at a solution which extends beyond the particular case(s) so as to cover all similar cases arising out of the same problem. The resulting judgment is a pilot judgment. In such a procedure, if found guilty, the State will be held responsible, in addition to the violation under consideration, for the repetitive or systemic nature of the violation, which will have to be redressed by general measures. Therefore, the central idea behind the pilot judgment procedure is that, where there is a large number of applications on the same issue, claimants will obtain compensation more quickly if an effective remedy is established at national level than when their cases are dealt with individually in Strasbourg. In the present study we shall analyse how the Court handled such cases before regulating the pilot judgment procedure, what does this procedure suppose exactly, what is the official regulatory text and what are the particularities of the procedure.

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