UK violated citizens’ convention rights in four cases last year

The court decided 1,997 cases lodged against the UK last year. Of these 1,970 or 98.7 per cent were struck out or declared inadmissible.

In 14, or 0.7 per cent of applications the ECtHR found no violation of the convention. It did find violations in 13 applications, or 0.7 per cent of the total.

The UK had the greatest number of judgments where no violation was found at 10 out of 14.

At the end of 2014 there were 1,234 UK applications awaiting judicial assessment. Of these, over 1,000 pertain to prisoners’ voting rights.

Strasbourg provided 896 judgments last year, with at least one violation of the ECHR being found in 84 per cent or 756 cases.

Speaking at the annual press conference of the court yesterday, Dean Spielmann, president of the ECtHR (pictured), took stock of the year 2014 and said that the court had continued to build on the progress made in 2013.

By the end of 2014 the number of pending cases stood at 69,900, a decrease of 30 per cent compared with the end of 2013 (100,000 applications pending).

The working methods adopted since the entry into force of protocol no. 14 have proved effective, he said, in particular the single-judge system and the introduction of a new section with responsibility for filtering.

The court also issued its annual activity report and its statistics for 2014.

The annual table of violations by country shows that the states with the highest number of judgments finding at least one violation of the convention were Russia (122 judgments), Turkey (94), Romania (74), Greece (50) and Hungary (49).

At 31 December 2014 the majority of pending cases were against Ukraine (19.5 per cent), Italy (14.4 per cent), Russia (14.3 per cent) and Turkey (13.6 per cent).

Half the priority cases concerned Russia or Romania.

The president reiterated his concern at the volume of repetitive cases, which account for more than half of all pending cases despite a significant decrease in 2014.