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Alastair Mowbray, Crisis Measures of Institutional Reform for the European Court of Human Rights, Human Rights Law Review, Volume 9, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 647–656, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngp023
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Extract
The ever increasing difficulties that the European Court of Human Rights (‘Court’) has faced in handling the remorseless increase in applications being lodged with it has been a topic regularly analysed in this journal. 1 Indeed, the first issue contained an examination of the emerging backlog of cases and President Wildhaber’s initial thoughts on institutional reform of the full-time Court. 2 In 2007 we noted the Russian Duma’s rejection of Protocol 14, thereby preventing Russian ratification of the Protocol. 3 Despite repeated public requests from both the political and judicial organs of the Council of Europe the Russian authorities have still not ratified this Protocol, with the consequence that it has not entered into force even though all the other 46 State Parties had ratified the Protocol by the autumn of 2006. In April 2008, the Chair of the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, Mrs Herta Daubler-Gmelin, wrote to the Head of the Russian delegation to the Assembly referring to the possibility of parties to a treaty voluntarily applying its provisions on a provisional basis prior to the formal entry into force of the treaty. 4 She based her letter on Article 25 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969 5 which provides that:
1. A treaty or part of a treaty is applied provisionally pending its entry into force if:
(a) the treaty itself so provides; or
(b) the negotiating States have in some other manner so agreed.
2. Unless the treaty otherwise provides or the negotiating States have otherwise agreed, the provisional application of a treaty or part of a treaty with respect to a State shall be terminated if that State notifies the other States between which the treaty is being applied provisionally of its intention not to become a party to the treaty.
