- According to the data of the European Court of Human Rights, as of January 1, 2011, 1230 complaints against the Azerbaijani Government were already acknowledged inadmissible, and 1254 more cases were pending a decision. Thus, only after Azerbaijan joined the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 2484 complaints from Azerbaijan were filed. According to the data as of June 30, 2011, only 1543 complaints were pending a decision, that is to say in six months their number grew by 313, excluding the previously redressed complaints. If we take into consideration that on average 50 complaints are monthly sent to the ECtHR from our country, we can safely assume that over 3000 complaints have been submitted to ECtHR from Azerbaijan. As of today, the Court has already passed 63 Resolutions (that is to say judgments, in which the Court determines whether the concrete rights or freedoms have been violated or not. 59 out of the 63 Resolutions were passed by the Chamber and 4 – by the Committee*. (*[1] According to Article 26 (1) of the Convention, for consideration of cases submitted to the Court that sits as a sole judge, to the Committees of three judges, to the Chamber of seven judges and to the Grand Chamber of seventeen judges. The Chambers of the Court act as ad hoc committees. )  At the Chamber level, 68 decisions were made on the admissibility of the complaints. Admissibility means it may be admitted for review by the Court. The fact of the submission of the complaint and the receipt of a letter for the ECtHR Secretariat on the assignment of a registration number does not yet mean that the complaint is already admitted for consideration. The majority of the complaints do not pass the admissibility determination stage. This number falls between 90 – 95% of the total number of complaints. The fact that the complaint is compiled by a good lawyer, is not yet a guarantee that it will be acknowledged admissible: even quite experienced lawyers do not quite precisely understand how to write a complaint. That is why many complaints do not arrive at the final phase of consideration.    

 

 

- 20% of the cases considered in the ECtHR had to do with the right to property (Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms), 19% related to the right to fair trial (Article 6 of the Convention), 13% referred to the non-fulfillment of court decisions (Article 6 of the Convention), 12% were connected with freedom and personal safety (Article 5 of the Convention),  36% of the cases  had to do with other rights and freedoms. It should be mentioned that if complaints related to criminal cases prevailed in the first years of Azerbaijan’s affiliation with the Convention and the enforcement of its Protocols, recently we can see an increase in the number of complaints referring to civil and administrative actions, especially those which deal with the violation of the right to property. This can be easily accounted for by the increase in the number of violations of the right to property in Azerbaijan, which in the last years has grown threatening. In this regard, Azerbaijan is, in the worst sense of the word, a leading country not only among the Council of Europe member states, but perhaps, worldwide. 

 

 

- Lawyers do not have major problems when sending complaints to ECtHR. However, there have already been cases when the Court Secretariat employees denied the receipt of documents sent from Azerbaijan for which Fax confirmations had been appropriately received.  For example, a petition was submitted on the relegation of S. Mammadov’s case against Azerbaijan to the Grand Chamber, after the promulgation of the Chamber’s resolution on this case. In spite of this petition being sent onto the Court’s Fax within the three-month period and the receipt of due confirmation, as well as its postage to ECtHR by regular post, the Secretariat informed the petitioner that the latter had failed to meet the three-month deadline, and they had not found the faxed copy of the petition.  

The enforcement of Protocol 14 of the Convention did not speed up the consideration of complaints, against all expectations. Some of the innovations are applied so that the practices cause serious objections from the petitioners and their lawyers. One of these innovations is Article 27 of the Convention, which authorizes the sole judge to acknowledge a complaint inadmissible, if such a decision is possible to make without additional examination of the complaint. This judgment is final. It seems that everything is clear here. Coming from the letter and spirit of this Article and the Convention, as a whole, we would assume that such complaints fail to comply with such criteria for admissibility as the six-month deadline and the exhaustion of national legal measures: the complaints should demonstrably fail to comply with both criteria to exclude any further need to consider the complaint. However, practice shows that the judge and the Secretariat lawyer’s duo may factually preclude the passage of most serious complaints. A judge from Greece, Sicilianos by name, is appointed the sole judge for Azerbaijan for a period of one year. In this capacity of his, he has made dozens (and maybe even hundreds) of decisions on the inadmissibility of complaints against Azerbaijan. And afterwards, the petitioners are only notified that their complaints have been acknowledged inadmissible, and they do not uncover the grounds for such a decision. Due to a weird concurrence of circumstances, most complaints that deal with major or even grand physical trespass are qualified as inadmissible. Very experienced Azerbaijani lawyers, very skilled at compiling complaints for the ECtHR, wonder at the reasons for such judgments on a number of cases. As it is well known, the decisions on inadmissibility cannot be appealed. And the sole judge does not make a separate decision on every individual case. Usually he simply inserts the resolution into a report, prepared by the reporter who is not the judge himself (on cases from Azerbaijan, this person is most probably an Azerbaijani lawyer). Thus, at the sole judge level the passage of most promising complaints may be disrupted. And the corresponding folders are subject to destruction in a year’s time! It is not accidental that a number of NGOs and political parties in Azerbaijan have sent a statement to Strasbourg, which hints at the probable corruption of some figures at ECtHR.  

 

 

- Compliance with the decisions of the Court in Azerbaijan leaves a lot to be desired. State bodies, as a rule, pay the money (compensations for moral and material damage, expenses incurred), awarded by the European Court in a timely manner. Some general measures are complied with: the resolutions are translated and disseminated among judges, prosecutors and so on. However, a number of individual measures have not been fulfilled until now. Thus, on S. Mammedov against Azerbaijan case, even a criminal case has not yet been filed on the fact of torture, regardless of the fact of the January 2007ECtHR’s resolution, which stipulated a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of torture). Obviously, the Prosecutor’s Office is waiting for the lapse of time. I deliberately mentioned this case with torture: the ECtHR acknowledged the fact of torture, the lack of effective investigation, however, no one has yet been held criminally liable. Whereas practicing torture continues in Azerbaijan. 

On many cases, in particular, on Panah Huseyn et al. against Azerbaijan (here I mean the case of complaints initiated by the former Prime Minister Panah Huseyn, the Chairman of the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan S. Mammedov and others), the cases are not being examined, even though the ECtHR resolutions have stipulated apparent violations of the right to fair trial and establish a necessity to review the case.