Article on the ECtHR and the protection of minority rights

 Bill Bowring has written the article Protecting minority rights through an individual rights mechanism: the Strasbourg Court, and some significant developments to June 2012 which will be published in the forthcoming issue of European Yearbook on Minority Issues. The article deals with several judgments of the ECtHR including an analysis of the case of V.C. v. Slovakia (I am planning to summarize this judgment later as well). 

This is the abstract:

The European Convention on Human Rights is essentially a document of the Eighteenth Century. With one possible exception it proclaims “first generation”, civil and political rights, and bears a remarkable resemblance to the French Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and to the revolutionary American Bills of Rights. It protects the rights of individuals, physical and legal, and of groups of individuals; but not of groups as such. Collective rights are the province of the European Social Charter of 1961.

In Volume 7 of the European Yearbook for Minority Issues, Leto Cariolou surveyed Developments in the Field of the European Court of Human Rights Concerning the Protection of Minorities, from December 2007 to February 2009. She also noted a number of complaints which had been communicated but not yet adjudicated.

This article first of all returns to the origin and context of the European system for the protection of human rights, in order to take stock of the efficacy of that system for the protection of minority rights. Next, I review some of the analytical tools developed by some of the leading scholars in the field. Third, I turn to a closer look at Timishev v Russia, the first case in which the Strasbourg Court applied Article 14 to a Chechen complaint.

The article then focuses on some of the landmark judgments since early 2009, under the following headings:

Roma and discrimination

The landmark judgment in D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic has been followed in the December 2009 Chamber judgment in Muñoz Díaz v. Spain;

First judgment under Protocol 12 to the ECHR: electoral rights and discrimination

A new landmark was established in December 2009, the Grand Chamber judgment in Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina;

An important correction on Roma education

On 16 March 2010 the Grand Chamber reversed a controversial chamber judgment in Oršuš and Others v. Croatia;

Forced sterilisation and Roma

The Court heard, with admirable speed, the case of V.C. v Slovakia;

Is there a right to “linguistic freedom”?

There was less success for the applicant in Birk-Levy v France.