Judging Groups in the European Court of Human Rights
Abstract
Like the majority of human rights treaties, the few extant minority group rights treaties contain reporting and monitoring mechanisms that are designed to serve as the sole means of measuring and ensuring state compliance with the legal obligations created by the treaties. Under the now-standard account, such reporting and monitoring mechanisms are considered inherently weak, and as a result, reforms are afoot to move away from pure self-reporting and towards systems that include other methods of monitoring. While the prior literature examining monitoring mechanisms analyzes their strengths and weaknesses only in the context of the unitary treaty regime they are created to serve, I suggest in this Article that they may need to be re-conceptualized to the extent that they are used not just in their primary capacities, but also to supplement the enforcement mechanisms of other human rights regimes with which they overlap.
The Article illustrates this intriguing possibility by reference to the reporting mechanism created to monitor compliance with the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. Looking at a group of recent cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights, I suggest that how effective a reporting and monitoring body may be should be reassessed to take account of situations when they are used as an important complement to a stronger adversarial tribunal, like the European Court of Human Rights. I demonstrate the potential ways that such integration may bolster both enforcement mechanisms and provide them with advantages they do not enjoy when working in isolation, as well as the ways that the model is particularly useful in the context of group-based claims. I conclude by briefly considering the possibility of an “integrated enforcement” model in other human rights contexts.