Applications by Tomsk residents to the European Court of Human Rights: experience and problems

Russians send a sufficiently large number of applications to the European Court of Human Rights: as of January 1, 2013 the ECHR had 27,450 applications filed against Russia, which was 21.6 % of the total number of applications under consideration of the ECHR at the time (it is to be recalled that the European Convention was ratified by 47 states, the Court may have applications against each of them). If to look at the total number of applications filed against each of the states, parties to the Convention, for the period from 1959 to 2011, one can see that the number of applications filed with the ECHR against Russia is 8.15 % of the total applications. And more than half of all applications to the ECHR (53.3 %) were filed against five states. In addition to Russia, which is one of the "five", these are: Turkey (18.49 % of the total applications), Italy (14.58 %), Poland (6.36 %) and France (5.7 %). However, the resolutions of the European Court were made only for 2 % of the applications filed against the Russian Federation, other applications were declared inadmissible. It should be noted that approximately the same statistics is common to all other countries that participate in the Convention: a very small proportion of applications is declared admissible and considered on their merits, and the rest are discarded immediately, without further consideration. For the period from 1998 to June 2015, the Court made 23 decisions on the applications of Tomsk residents. In 12 of them, the Court established the presence of at least one violation of the rights enshrined in the Convention, in three cases no violations were found, three cases were removed from consideration (the Court received no applicant's reply to the questions of the ECHR, which was the basis for concluding that that the applicants lost their interest in the application). It seems that there are several reasons for the fact that only a very small part of the applications filed by Russians is considered by the Court on the merits, and these reasons are both objective (the severity of the admissibility criteria) and quite "subjective" (the applicants' failure to comply with application forms, not knowing the legal positions of the European Court, which leads to the impossibility of a satisfactory substantiation of the application and, therefore, the Court's recognition of the application inadmissible due to its clear groundlessness).

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