In the course of 2017, the European Court of Human Rights registered 758 applications against Moldova, a decrease of 9% compared with 2016, when 839 applications were submitted. Moldova ranks seventh out of 47 states by the number of recorded applications. The data were presented by the Legal Resources Center of Moldova in a news conference at IPN on January 26.
Since 1998 until 2017, the ECHR had logged over 13,400 applications filed against Moldova. On December 31, 1,348 of these (10.1%) were pending.
According to the head of the Legal Resources Center Vladislav Gribincea, the lower number of filed applications is due to the declining popularity of the ECHR, which in 2011-2016 rejected over 8,600 applications submitted by Moldovans without an explicit reason. However, compared with the country’s population, the number of applications against Moldova to the ECHR remains rather high. “In 2017, the number of Moldovans who went to the ECHR was three times higher than the European average,” stated the jurist.
By December 2017, the ECHR passed 354 judgments on Moldovan cases, 16 of which last year, by seven fewer than in 2016. “In this regard, the Republic of Moldova outstrips a lot Germany, Spain or the Netherlands, which joined the ECHR long before Moldova and have a much larger population,” stated Vladislav Gribincea.
In the 16 decisions passed in 2017, the ECHR ascertained 14 cases of violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. In eight cases, it was established that the articles that ban the use of torture and the right to liberty and security were violated. The other cases referred to the non-implementation of national court judgments, inappropriate investigation of cases of ill-treatment and death, poor detention conditions, illegal quashing of irrevocable court judgments and maltreatment or use of excessive force by representatives of the state.
Based on all the judgments and decisions passed since 1998 until December 31, 2017, the Republic of Moldova was obliged to pay over €16.3 million damages, more than €107,300 of which in 2017.
