Brighton Declaration of the European Court of Human Rights in United Kingdom

“The 47 member nations of the Council of Europe agreed a package of reforms at a conference in Brighton in 2012. These reforms were published in the Brighton Declaration. The plan is to amend the introduction to the European Convention on Human Rights (known as the preamble) to include the principle of subsidiarity, a principle developed in the ECtHR’s case law and which under these reforms will be expressly mentioned in the Convention. There is some disagreement about what exactly is meant by the ‘principle of subsidiarity’, but the Brighton Declaration refers to a shared responsibility between State Parties and the European Court of Human Rights for realising the effective implementation of the Convention and the fact that States Parties may choose how to fulfil their obligations under the Convention. This reflects the fact that the Convention system is subsidiary to the safeguarding of human rights at national level and that national authorities are in principle better placed than an international court to evaluate local needs and conditions.
The preamble will also be amended to expressly state that State Parties enjoy a margin of appreciation in how they apply and implement the Convention, depending on the circumstances of the case and the rights and freedoms engaged.

The Brighton Declaration proposes a number of reforms to the court process to try and reduce the backlog of cases. Applicants may be charged a fee to bring a case to the court, and a tighter admissibility test will be applied to filter out weak cases. The Declaration states that an application should be rejected as manifestly ill-founded “unless the Court finds that the application raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of the Convention”. The time limit for bringing claims will be reduced from six to four months. The court will be given the power to give advisory opinions. The selection process for judges will be improved. These amendments now have to be adopted by each
Member State and it is intended that this will be done by the end of 2013.”

Source: Update to English Legal System (Elliot).

See Also

The European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights Administration
The European Convention on Human Rights
Human Rights (ECHR) Milestone Cases
YL v Birmingham City Council (2007)