NGOs and Litigation before the European Court of Human Rights

This is a compact, interesting and well-written book that should be of interest to all students of the European Convention on Human Rights, especially in the United Kingdom. It is not an all-embracing account of what its rather grand title seems to promise, but rather a snapshot of non-governmental organization (NGO) activity at the European Court of Human Rights during a short period of time. More specifically, it looks at the involvement of NGOs in cases that were decided by that Court in the year 2000 – not in all 442 of those cases but just 149, that being the number which remained after the author put to one side the 293 cases which had been brought against Italy in relation to delays in trial processes and in which, so far as he could ascertain, there was no NGO involvement whatsoever. In an Appendix to the book the author explains in some detail the methodology he adopted for his research, and his account of the difficulties he encountered when seeking to examine case files in Strasbourg will be useful to anyone who is thinking of undertaking similar work. He supplemented the documentation analysis by conducting interviews with staff of some of the NGOs involved in the cases but not, it seems, with individual applicants, lawyers for respondent governments, or officials at the Registry in Strasbourg. The interviews were carried out in 2002 or 2003, hence there is no guarantee that the picture painted is the one that obtains today. The author does include sections headed ‘recent developments’, which attempt to sum up what the NGOs in question have been doing in the intervening years, but these accounts are not based on the same kind of materials as were used for the earlier years and are therefore quite superficial and subjective

Convention · Documentation · Human rights · Political science · Respondent · European and International Law Studies · Law