Only one fifth of Moldovan complaints lodged with ECHR are admissible, Govt. representative says

Roughly 80 percent of the applications lodged by the Moldovan citizens with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are declared inadmissible from the start, without even notifying the Moldovan Government of them, said Vladimir Grosu, the government representative to ECHR, at a news conference. Vladimir Grosu informed that out of the 2,400 applications submitted by Moldovans at ECHR, the Government was formally notified of 400. “I agree that the number of applications lodged by the Moldovan citizens with the ECHR cannot be ignored. Yet it has been found that many of them are unjustified and some of them are even abusive”, said Grosu. According to him, from the beginning of the year, the ECHR has pronounced 28 judgments in cases concerning Moldova, in 23 of which it was found that articles of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. The government representative added that the most recurrent abuses complained of at the ECHR remain to be those concerning the right to a fair trial and the failure to enforce court decisions. At the same time, this year there have been submitted a considerable number of complaints concerning torture and ill-treatment, while the number of cases related to freedom of expression has been decreasing. Since 1997 when the Republic of Moldova ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR has notified the Government of 440 applications and issued 133 judgments. In 124 of them the Court found the violation of at least one right protected by the Convention, one judgment declared that no violation had occurred, three judgments ruled equitable satisfaction, and four were strike-out judgments. In this period, the Court has issued 89 decisions, 19 of which were inadmissibility decisions and 70 were strike-out decisions