Pyrrhic Legal Victories: ERRC Litigation Outcomes in 2007
Pyrrhic Legal Victories: ERRC Litigation Outcomes in 2007

Summary/Abstract: Two thousand and seven could well be described as the year of vindication for the ERRC. During the past year, the European Court of Human Rights (“the Court”) issued a number of very important judgments on applications brought forward by the ERRC exclusively or together with other NGOs. Among them, the Grand Chamber’s judgment (overturning the Chamber’s judgment) in the application D.H. and others v. The Czech Republic can only be considered one of the most far-reaching judgments ever handed down by the Court, on a number of issues ranging from segregated education to the notion of “informed consent” as well as the role of NGO/INGO reports in proceedings before the Court.2 The latter point is one dear to the ERRC as ever since its inception it focused on both strategic litigation and research/report publication, with one strand of its activities feeding into the other. Although initially confronted with a negative approach by the Court (which persistently rejected references to NGO/INGO and United States’ State Department country reports in the context of applications brought forward by the ERRC), the ERRC persisted and the Court nowadays has radically changed its stance on this issue, even going so far as to what undoubtedly amounts to (truly well-deserved) praise to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch by assigning probative value on their reports regarding Tunisia.3 The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most important judgments issued by the Court in 2007 in two fields of great importance to Roma, namely police abuse and housing.

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