Committee of Ministers to supervise the execution of European Court of Human Rights judgments

The Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers will hold its third  special "human rights" meeting of 2008 from 17 to 18 September. The Committee will supervise the adoption of individual measures needed to erase the consequences for applicants of violations established by the Court (including the payment of any just satisfaction awarded) and/or general measures (legislative or other changes) aimed at preventing new similar violations.

361 new cases will be examined. 26 raise questions related to the adoption of new general measures. The others are either linked to issues which are already examined under other cases, or do not reveal any structural problem.

In the remaining cases, the Committee will examine progress made, notably as far as some 300 legislative or other reforms are concerned.

At the meeting, the Committee will also consider the adoption of final resolutions in 110 cases in which all of the necessary execution measures have been taken, and will assess whether some 42 further cases are ready to be closed.

A preliminary list of items/cases to be examined at the meeting (the 1035th meeting of the Ministers' deputies) is available on the Committee of Ministers website, www.coe.int/t/cm/home_en.asp. To this list should be added the judgments which became final after the last "human rights" meeting (June 2008). The latest public information on the main cases under examination is available, on a country-by-country basis, on the website www.coe.int/Droits_de_l'Homme/execution, under the heading "State of execution".

Interim Resolutions and the most important decisions will become public at the end of the meeting. Other decisions, and the annotated agenda (with information on the progress made in the different cases), will be made public once formally adopted a fortnight after the meeting. These texts, together with more comprehensive information on the execution of judgments by member states, are available at www.coe.int/t/cm/home_en.asp and www.coe.int/Human_rights/execution. The Committee of Ministers' annual report for 2007 on its supervision of judgments is also available on these sites.

1 According to Article 46 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

"1. The High Contracting Parties undertake to abide by the final judgment of the Court in any case to which they are parties.
2. The final judgment of the Court shall be transmitted to the Committee of Ministers, which shall supervise its execution."