Slovenia – An Exemplary Complier With Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights?

Abstract

Since its inception in 1959, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, Court) has rendered more than 22.500 judgments to address violations of human rights across Europe. Public attention surrounding the Court’s work has focused mostly on the violations that the Court establishes in its judgments and at times, the high sums of compensation it awards to victims. Yet, the issue of compliance with and implementation of such judgments has often been neglected and overlooked in public discourse. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that more than half of all judgments rendered by the Court remain to this day unenforced.

This article stems from the “Human Rights Nudge” project, a research project funded by the ERC, which investigates both what the Court expects of states to undertake in response to its judgments and how states react. In this context, it studies past cases of human rights violations and analyses whether, when and why states change their practice. In this context, this article studies the behaviour of the Republic of Slovenia - one of 47 Council of Europe member states - with respect to the Court’s judgments. It observes the actions of the state from two perspectives – first, it analyses the nature and pace of Slovenia’s compliance with the Court’s judgments, which often leads to a quick and successful closing of the case by the Committee of Ministers (CM) and second, it investigates Slovenia’s actual implementation and internalisation of adverse judgments into its (legal) system, aiming to remedy past and prevent similar future violations. In this respect, the article seeks to understand how different remedies – suggested by the Court or proposed by the state - influence Slovenia’s compliance. The implications of such approach are twofold. First, they show which compliance measures are persuasive enough for the CM to end its supervision and close the cases and second, they indicate whether and to what extent Slovenia respects the ECtHR system and how successfully the state plays its part in the CM supervision procedure.

JEL Classification: K33