Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as a fundamental instrument of the European law – does this statement still remain valid?

Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is often referred as a fundamental instrument of the European law. The following study, through a detailed description of the circumstances of creation of the Convention, its normative content, enforcement mechanism and the current context in which it is in force, seeks to demonstrate whether the above statement remains valid in the current political and legal reality. It is true that in the Convention sovereign states accepted for the first time legal obligations to secure the classical human rights and freedoms and – what is particularly relevant – to allow all individuals to bring applications against the state, leading to a specially founded international judicial body finding them in breach. This was a crucial, revolutionary step in the evolution of the international law that, for centuries, had been based on such deeply entrenched foundations as the ideas that the settlement of the freedoms and rights of individuals was within the domestic jurisdiction of states and that individuals were not subjects of rights in this law. The Convention has thus generated the effective enforcement mechanism in the world, which contribution to the setting of standards for the protection of human rights and freedoms is unrivalled. However, it cannot be lost from one’s sight that currently the presence of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in the European legal space and the weakness of the Council of Europe, under of which auspices the European Convention on Human Rights was adopted, manifesting itself in the fact that it associates a large number of countries with quite diverse political and legal culture and the standards of democracy, make the practical importance of the Convention be the subject of constant verification.

The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania and European Standards of the Right to Court

The purpose of this article is to analyse the constitutional basis for the activity the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania and to represent the functions of this Court in respect of the harmonization of national and transnational defence mechanisms of human right to a fair trial. The article is divided into several basic parts: first of all, it shows the constitutional grounds for the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania, the creation and the relevant characteristics of its status and activities; later, the article discusses the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania, which analyses the right to a fair trial; the article ends with an assessment of the impact of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union for the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court while defending the right to a fair trial.

Comments on the requirements for an individual  application to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg

The subject of this article is to present formal and material conditions which an individual application must satisfy in order not to be declared as inadmissible and in order to be examined by the European Court of Human Rights. These are above all: requirements of ratione personae, ratione materiae, ratione temporis and ratione loci, the necessity of exhausting of all domestic remedies, the necessity of keeping a period of six months from the date on which the final decision was taken and apart from that – since the Protocol No. 14 to the Convention came into force – suffering from a significant disadvantage. Some of these conditions will however be altered, if Protocol No. 15 to the Convention entries into force. It provides: (1) the shortening, from six to four months, of the time-limit within which an application can be brought before the Court after all domestic remedies have been exhausted, as stipulated in Article 35, paragraph 1, of the Convention, and (2) the deletion of the present admissibility requirement, in Article 35, paragraph 3 (b) of the Convention, which specifies that no case be rejected under this provision if it has not been duly considered by a domestic court.