Interlaken High Level Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights 

NORWEGIAN COMMENTS ON DRAFT DECLARATION 12.02.2010 

Norway highly appreciates the considerable efforts Swiss authorities have made to adjust the draft 
Declaration to the differing opinions of member States. On the whole, we think that the revised draft 
Declaration is a good compromise. 

However, we are concerned about the new budgetary provision, paragraph 4 in the Implementation 
section, which reads as follows: 

“In order to implement the Action Plan, the Conference: (...) 

(4) invites the Committee of Ministers to determine, on the basis of an evaluation of the effects of 
Protocol No. 14 and of the implementation of other relevant measures, whether additional 
budgetary means need to be provided to the Court and to the Committee of Ministers in order to 
ensure that the backlog can be reduced and that new cases can be decided within a reasonable 
time.” 

We have a clear preference for the wording on the budget in the previous draft Declaration. It invited 
the Committee of Ministers to provide the Court and the Committee of Ministers with the budgetary 
means necessary in order to reach the goals set out in the preamble. Accordingly, the Court would 
only have to be provided with additional means if and as far as necessary. 

In our opinion, it is necessary to increase the Court’s budget, at least in the short and medium term, 
in order to enable the Court to reduce the backlog of cases and to decide upon new cases within a 
reasonable time-limit. 

We have noted, however, that a number of member States disagree with us and we will therefore 
not oppose an assessment of the Court’s budgetary needs. 

But in view of the current situation of the Court we do not agree that the assessment can be 
postponed until after the effects of Protocol No. 14 and other relevant measures have been 
evaluated. The Court requested a new three-year recruitment plan last year, and the consideration of 
that request has already been postponed until after the Interlaken Conference. As stated in the 
preamble of the draft Interlaken Declaration, the current situation causes damage to the 
effectiveness and credibility of the Convention and its supervisory machinery and represents a threat 
to the quality and the consistency of the case-law and the authority of the Court, and additional 
measures are indispensable and urgently required. 

Moreover, to postpone the assessment of the Court’s budgetary needs until after the effects of 
Protocol No. 14 have been evaluated, would not be in conformity with the decision taken by the 
Committee of Ministers at the 114th Ministerial session when Protocol No. 14 was adopted. 

In the Declaration of the Committee of Ministers ensuring the effectiveness of the implementation of 
the European Convention on Human Rights at national and European levels, adopted on 12 May 
2004, the Ministers Deputies where asked to “assess the resources necessary for the rapid and 
efficient implementation of the Protocol, in particular for the Court and its registry in the framework 
of the new mechanism for the filtering of applications, and to take measures accordingly.” 


Norway therefore proposes to delete the wording between the commas in paragraph 4. It would 
then read as follows: 

“(4) invites the Committee of Ministers to determine, on the basis of an evaluation of the effects of 
Protocol No. 14 and of the implementation of other relevant measures, whether additional 
budgetary means need to be provided to the Court and to the Committee of Ministers in order to 
ensure that the backlog can be reduced and that new cases can be decided within a reasonable 
time.” 

Furthermore, we think that the Committee of Ministers should decide no later than before the end 
of 2015 whether more profound changes to the control mechanism of the Convention are necessary, 
and therefore repeat our proposal to delete the final sentence in paragraph 7 of the Implementation 
section. 

In the appended annotated draft Declaration, we have also proposed a few purely technical 
amendments.