Thursday 22 March 2012

New Joint NGO Statement on Draft Brighton Declaration

Following an earlier open letter, the same group of leading human rights NGOs has published a new joint statement with further comments: 'Joint NGO input to the ongoing negotiations on the draft Brighton Declaration on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights'. The statement emphasizes three main points: it warns against curtailing access to the Court by making the admissibility criteria overly severe, it argues against casting the notions of subsidiarity and margin of appreciation into stone (= into the Convention) since this would curtail the Court's own nuanced approach and, finally, it calls for respite in the reform process after all the new proposals from Interlaken and Izmir - and certainly for civil society involvement in any further reform steps.