In 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) received the lowest number of applications against the Republic of Moldova during the last 12 years – 523. This is by 18% less than in 2019. However, against the country’s population, the number of applications is very high. By this figure, Moldova in 2020 ranked ninth out of 47 member states of the Council of Europe. The Moldovans went to the ECHR three times more often compared with the European average. On December 31, 2020, 1,054 applications submitted by plaintiffs from Moldova were still pending. Of these, 4% were considered without chances of success at first sight. Respectively, over 95% have big changes of being solved successfully. The data were presented by the Legal Resources Center from Moldova (LRCM) in a news conference at IPN.
Daniel Goinic, legal adviser at the LRCM, said that given that confidence in the judiciary hasn’t changed considerably in 2020 compared with 2018-2019, the decrease in applications is due to the decline in the ECHR’s popularity among the population, but the pandemic situation also had an impact. Since 1998 until December 31, 2020, the ECHR recorded over 15,300 applications against Moldova. The Republic of Moldova on December 31, 2020 had 473 judgments in Moldovan cases, 32 of which were pronounced in 2020. “Together with the pending over 1,000 applications, the figure can at least double the next few years,” stated Daniel Goinic.
Globally, the ECHR in 2020 logged by 6% fewer applications than in 2019. 43% of the received applications were against Turkey and the Russian Federation. Over 2/3 of the pending applications were against the Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine or Romania. In this regard, Moldova ranks tenth out of the 47 member states of the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2020, the ECHR passed 871 judgments. Most of them were against the Russian Federation, Turkey and Ukraine. Moldova came seventh.
LRCM president Vladislav Gribincea noted that the number of judgments passed in Moldovan cases in 2020 was by 41% lower than in 2019. By the total number of judgments, Moldova outstrips considerably such countries as Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, which joined the ECHR much earlier than Moldova and have a population that is much larger than Moldova’s. “By the number of judgments against the situation in the Republic of Moldova, in general, during all the years the Republic of Moldova has been among the top ten countries. These statistics confirm once against that we probably have a serious problem in the legal system,” stated Vladislav Gribincea.
In the 32 judgments passed in 2020, the ECHR ascertained 50 violations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Most of them refer to the activity of judges. Fifteen violations concern the right to a fair trial. Among the most important decisions passed in 2020 were the arbitrary detention in penitentiary, maltreatment of a minor by detainees and the removal of the Our Party from the race for the parliamentary elections without convincing evidence and based on arbitrary decisions.
The analytical note “Republic of Moldova at the European Court of Human Rights in 2020” was compiled in the framework of the project “Ensuring Implementation in Moldova of Better Human Rights Standards” that is implemented by the Legal Resources Center from Moldova and is financially supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
