 Okay, thank you all very much and I think we'll get proceedings underway. Please. My name is Alex White. I'm Director General here at the Institute of International and European Affairs and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all here this afternoon. What I know is going to be a most interesting engagement with our distinguished guest, Schieffer O'Leary, President of the European Court of Human Rights. The 1949 Statute of the Council of Europe requires member states to accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment of all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms on pain in case of serious violations of expulsion. One of the principle means for achieving greater unity and safeguarding the signatory state's common heritage was and is the European Convention on Human Rights and its innovative mechanism for the collective enforcement of individual rights. 75 years on from the establishment of the Convention, it's our, as I say, great honor to have with us the President of the European Court of Human Rights to reflect on these issues and to offer her insights. Schieffer O'Leary has been a judge of the European Court of Human Rights since 2015. Having served as a section President and Vice President since 2020, she was elected President of the Court in 2022 and prior to being with the European Court of Human Rights, President O'Leary worked for many years at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She is a visiting, where's my page, professor at the College of Europe and Bruges and was previously Assistant Director of the Center of European Law at the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of and as a fellow of manual college. So for those of you who are familiar with our drill here, the judge will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so, give or take, and then we'll have an opportunity for a Q&A with the audience. You can join us obviously if you're here in the room by the simple expedient of putting your hand up and offering to ask a question. If you're following us online, you'll be able to join using the Q&A function, you'll see it there in the screen. As we always say, if something occurs to you, if you are watching online, something occurs to you when it's said or question is bubbling up in your mind, there's nothing to stop you or delay you, putting the question in when it occurs to you, so that it's there when the President has finished and we can have the opportunity to put your question. You can join also on X using the handle at IIEA, we're live streaming this morning's discussion, so very warm welcome to people who are tuning in on YouTube. So it's now my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you the President of the European Court of Human Rights, Shia Froh Leary. Thank you very much, Alex, ladies and gentlemen. It's a real pleasure to be with you on this St Patrick's weekend and my warm thanks to the organizers. I see many familiar faces in the audience, including some of my law lecturers, so I can't get this wrong. As an Irish woman who's devoted her entire professional career to European law and to Europe, I've always admired the work of the Institute and the platform that it's provided over the decades for informed debate and considered reflection within this jurisdiction. Looking around Europe and beyond, and this was a subject of discussion at lunch, we see the consequences in certain societies of a failure to engage in an informed manner, but the important political, legal and social questions of our time, whether at national or international level. And we also see in the age of social media, with what speed information vacuums can be filled and with what. I understand that today's audience is composed of both lawyers and non-lawyers and as such, my intervention will seek to give all present a sense of the work of the European Court of Human Rights, whose job it is to interpret and apply the now 75 year old convention. What challenges is my court facing? What challenges does the work of the court pose for national systems across the 46 member states? And why, despite some legitimate criticism of the convention system, should we in Europe be very grateful for the legacies of our forebearers and minded to preserve what is really an essential and unique human rights protection mechanism. As the judge elected in respect of Ireland and for the time being its president, I leave the court in July. I hear cases as part of an international court whose job is essentially to assess whether states which ratified the convention have respected their international legal obligations. And these are of course obligations which those states sovereignly subscribed to. The 46 convention states range from Ireland to Azerbaijan and from Finland to Malta and included the Russian Federation until its expulsion from the Council of Europe in March 2022, following the invasion of Ukraine. In other words, the provision of the statute kicked in for the first time. Our role in the thousands of cases, and I'll give you the figures in a while, lodged each year by individuals or in the much rarer interstate cases is not to establish criminal guilt or civil liability or to substitute the work of national judges like John McMeneman previously, whose decisions in the applicants cases must proceed ours. It is instead to provide external, and that's an important point, European supervision of domestic decisions and to whole states accountable for any breaches of fundamental rights and freedoms in the convention. Before giving you a taste of some of the challenges currently facing the court and they are numerous, let me provide first a little bit of history. The origins of the convention are of course to be found in the atrocities perpetuated by totalitarian regimes on European soil and beyond during the Second World War. And the spirit of the post-war years, spirit of never again, is summed up in the famous speech delivered by Winston Churchill in Zurich in 1946. The 1948 Hague Congress that inspired the founding of the Council of Europe called for a charter of human rights and for a court to enforce it. The convention was thus conceived as an early warning system to combat the first signs of totalitarianism. And as Pierre Henri Titian, a French resistance fighter and one of the founding fathers remarked, the latter totalitarianism doesn't develop in a day. He said and I quote, democracies are asphyxiated over time. It's a point I think we should think about, looking at the world scene and the scene in Europe at present. While the constitutions of many European states guaranteed individuals certain elementary rights and freedoms, it was considered at the time and experience has shown that these constitutional guarantees when purely national were not and are not always strong enough to secure their protective aims. Constitutional guarantees can be overridden by governments and national authorities out of neglect by mistake or indeed on purpose. And the establishment of the Strasbourg Court represented an abandonment of the idea that the state's sovereignty over its citizens was absolute and unrestrained. So the convention which we interpret and apply gives individuals the right to take a case before an international court when they've tried national legal remedies or when no effective national legal remedies exist. Member states for their part assume the obligation to effectively protect the rights and freedoms enshrined in the convention with the primary responsibility and this is crucial, lying with national authorities and particularly national courts. The states accept or they're meant to accept international monitoring by the Strasbourg Court while respecting its authority independence and autonomy as well as the binding legal force of its judgments and decisions. As Cambridge Professor Hirsch Lauterberg remarked in 1949 in an article about the soon to be created European Court of Human Rights and I quote, even in countries in which the rule of law is an integral part of the national heritage and in which the courts have been the faithful guardians of the rights of the individual. There is room for a procedure which will put the imprimatur of international law upon the principle that the state is not the final judge of human rights. If I'm not mistaken John, you said something along those lines in the case called O'Callaghan that I'll mention in a little while. In the early days of the court work was scarce. Between 1959 and 1976 just 18 cases were brought before the court and for a period of seven years no cases were brought at all. Yet even in this follow early period the court established some important founding principles. In its first judgment which was in an Irish case, Lawless from 1960, concerned the extrajudicial internment of members of the IRA in the 1950s and the Cura and the state's declaration of an emergency. In another judgment adopted the same decade in the Belgian Linguistics case the court established its case law in the prohibition of discrimination and the right to education. The 1970s ushered in what was regarded as a golden era of Strasbourg case law. Examples include Golder against the United Kingdom on the right of access to court, Tyre against the United Kingdom on the use of corporate punishment, area against Ireland and absolutely crucial ruling on the establishment of positive obligations on states to provide effective access to court in civil cases including via the provision of a free of free legal aid while in essence one of the courts first if not its first socio-economic rights judgment or the first interstate case to lead to a judgment Ireland against the United Kingdom in which the court established the distinction between inhumane integrating treatment and torture but in that case it also set down the parameters for how the court may or must act when a respondent state refuses to cooperate despite essential information being within its purview and these parameters are now proving absolutely essential in cases still pending against the Russian Federation following its expulsion during this period the court began to develop different techniques its teleological approach to interpretation according to which the convention must be interpreted so as to achieve its purpose namely the practical and effective protection of fundamental rights the living instrument document much criticized but also much misunderstood according to which the convention can and must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions and recognition as I said in the airy case that states may owe positive obligations and not simply be bound by an obligation not to interfere with an individual's rights the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the soviet union were the next game changers many of the soviet republics sought entry first to the council of europe and subsequently to the european union and the consequent enlargement in the 1990s of the council of europe and the accession of states from central and eastern europe led to a huge increase in the work of the court from 1959 to 1998 and the word in the other words for the first 40 years of the court's existence approximately 143 000 applications were lodged 32 500 decisions were declared inadmissible over 830 judgments were delivered by the court and over 37 000 decisions were adopted by what was called the european commission whose job it was at the time to filter out any inadmissible applications so only a small percentage reached the court fast forward 25 years by last year the court had dealt with over 1 million applications and handed down over 26 000 judgments following the eastern expansion of the council of europe by mid 2011 the court's docket had reached an all-time and totally unsustainable high and what we've done for the last 10 or more years is engage in enormous external and internal reforms to reduce the docket from 161 000 in 2011 two i can say as the court's president the still seriously challenging 67 300 applications pending today in the past three years to give you a sense of what the workload is like we've dealt with on average 38 000 applications per year delivering judgments in over 6 900 applications last year alone we've also had to respond to a mass influx of cases related to specific regional state or societal events such as the conflicts in first georgia and then ukraine in 2008 14 and 2022 the aftermath of the attempted coup d'etat in turkey in 2016 or the covid pandemic 19 pandemic and in the context of the enlargement of the council of europe which i just mentioned the convention system played a prominent role in ensuring democratic change in central and eastern european states and in relation to those states which joined the european union it played an absolutely essential role on their road to accession and the same can be expected to happen in relation to other council of europe states such as moldova ukraine montenegro and others which are now eu candidate states indeed without the work of the strazburg court or the council of europe's venice commission it's really difficult to see how that road to accession could be handled at all so why was there such a dramatic increase in the number of applications before the court in the first decade of course the larger number of states parties to the convention is one explanation and the fact that many of these transitional democracies essentially created a significant number of applications but the major reason for the increase in the court's work was the creation in 1998 of the single full-time european court putting an end to the filtering out of inadmissible complaints by the former european commission and i think i can fairly say that the structure and logic of this change were conceived long before the full ramifications of council of europe enlargement to 47 states including at the time russia was understood and this provides a good springboard for me to turn to the key challenges and i'll concentrate on just three since the establishment of the permanent court in 1998 the judges and registry have simply been grappling with one central difficulty the size and the nature of the docket each year we need to filter out a huge volume of inadmissible cases over 30 000 last year process large numbers of more or less identical legal complaints about 80 of the 67 000 plus cases pending relate to issues where the case law is well established there is no jurisprudential development needed but at the same time as doing all of this we have to deal carefully with complaints raising complex and novel legal issues of human rights law in sufficiently good time to ensure that the outcome is meaningful for the applicant for the respondent state and for the national courts in the respondent state or indeed in other type states the type of new and complex legal issues i'm referring to relate to the effects on convention rights of anything from climate change in relation to which we have three major grand chamber cases pending social media usage in free and pluralistic democracies bioethical questions or the effect of new technologies on our societies and our rights consideration of these legal questions requires both time and resources something that we discussed also over lunch but the court sets out in the general principles of a given judgment constitutes the minimum convention standard across 46 quite heterogeneous states however as i said close to 80 of our docket is made up of issues which have already been dealt with by case law and to give you two concrete examples in relation to prison conditions the court has established very clear standards in terms of cell space light ventilation sanitary facilities with which national authorities have to comply in order not to breach article three of the convention yet over 5000 applications on our current docket relate to this issue and the issue well it might not affect our land directly does affect our land indirectly because in relation to this issue the european arrest warrant may have some difficulties if the prisons to which people are being sent are not article three compatible in relation to the basic rule of law obligation under article six of the convention to enforce decisions handed down by national courts in 2017 having already dealt with over 14 000 applications on this issue in relation to Ukraine and with 12 000 applications still pending the court literally passed the buck to the council of europe committee of ministers responsible for execution it considered that there was no more european road to travel on this particular issue because there was clearly a systemic problem and the solution to the systemic problem lay at a political and financial level so the first challenge relates to the size and nature of the docket and the failure to find solutions nationally to problems in relation to which the jurisprudential answer has already been provided often repeatedly 14 000 applications in relation to Ukraine that's a lot of judge and registry work a second challenge relates to conflicts in recent years the court has seen a marked increase in the number of interstate cases due to an increase in conflicts between council of europe member states or former member states currently there are 14 pending interstate cases before the court covering 18 applications 12 of the 14 pending cases relate to ongoing con conflicts between council of europe states or former states and five of these cases involve the russian federation and these cases are particularly challenging both in terms of their legal and factual complexity and the resources they require they also give rise to a very high number of related individual applications about eight or nine thousand and following the expulsion of the russian federation in 2022 the court also remains competent to deal with applications directed against that state in relation to acts or emissions capable of constituting a violation of human rights as long as they occurred before the 16th of september 2022 the key relevance of that date is that's the date that russia ceased to be a high contracting party to the convention and there's clearly a need to ensure that a state that ceases to be a contracting party due to its expulsion from the council of europe cannot retroactively evade its international law obligations and accountability for what may be very serious violations of human rights last year the court handed down thousands of many many judgments in relation to thousands of applications pending against the russian federation in individual cases it also heard the interstate case on the 2014 invasion of Crimea and a second hearing will take place in june in relation to the invasion of eastern ukraine and the downing of malaysia airlines flight mh-17 and the complexity of these cases is as i said further compounded by the fact that the former high contracting party remains a respondent state but it has refused to cooperate with the court and the final challenge which i'll mention relates to the authority and the raison d'etre of the court itself and it was well summed up in general terms not limited to the strazberg court of the convention system by our own chief justice in ucd in 2021 he made the point and i quote that the post war model of judicial protection of human rights is under more challenge today in more significant ways and in more locations than at any time since 1945 now in reality the perspective of a strazberg judges at the post war model of judicial protection of human rights has never really gone unchallenged and indeed in some quarters it was never fully accepted or understood there seems to have been an idea mistakenly nurtured by some of the drafters and signatories although not i should add perhaps arland that the convention was for other states and not a matter of domestic concern respect for human rights being considered beyond reproach on the home front and yet we do now appear in 2024 to be at a watershed moment parliamentary debates or ministerial speeches in more than one council of europe member state fixate on the need to defy interim measures issued by and i quote a foreign court the consequences of particular judgments which i don't either appeal to a majority in society or to a ruling party are rejected opposition figures the subject of repeat judgments in strazberg ordering their liberation continue to languish in prison one of the most prominent alexi nevalny recently died as you know in a penal colony in the arctic circle he had eight strazberg judgments in his favor and he had 27 cases still pending as a judge i don't of course comment on draft national legislation but i think i can for the purpose of my illustration of current challenges facing the convention system point to the recent assessment by a national parliamentary committee whose job it is to assess such draft legislation in a recent report on a bill which it considers denies access to justice and effective remedies the uk joint committee on human rights emphasized that and i quote hostility to human rights is at the heart of the bill and yet the irony and this is very important is that the convention is a protection mechanism which allows many of these same convention states 26 in total to intervene before the strazberg court in one of the pending interstate cases brought by ukraine against the russian federation that i've just mentioned and those states intervene in that case very explicitly in support of accountability for violations of international law and in defense of what the strazberg court has repeatedly referred to for over seven decades as the common public order of the free democracies of europe this dichotomy between some states reception of the convention system within their own jurisdiction and their perception of the role of that system in the jurisdiction of other counsel of europe states supports the point i made in the opening part of this segment on challenges namely the mistaken idea that the convention was and is for other states and not a matter of domestic concern turning from the challenges to the convention system to the challenging nature of strazberg court judgments let's be clear our rulings don't always please first of all as regards many of our applicants to borrow the words of us supreme court justice frankfurter it's a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people secondly as regards the judgments themselves they may displease either the respondent governments to which they're addressed or members of the public who for better or worse may have very different views on where the correct balance between for example the protection of human life and the protection of the general public may lie the case of mccann and others against the united kingdom is a good illustration it concerned as some of you may remember the killing in Gibraltar by members of the uk security forces of three members of the ira suspected of involvement in a bombing mission it wasn't an easy case the grand chamber was split 10 9 the judgment however set the benchmark for the court's treatment of cases concerning the protection of the right to life under article 2 of the convention the use of force while permitted must be no more than absolutely necessary for the achievement of one of the legitimate aims set out in article 2 and the court wasn't convinced after a very detailed forensic examination that the force used and the killing of the suspects complied with the requirements of article 2 it concentrated on the control and organization of the security operation a tabloid newspaper published the phone number of the court's registrar on the morning that the mccann ruling was delivered and that event as you can imagine gave rise to the creation of our press service whose task ever since has been to explain and clarify complex and in places on popular rulings to press and public across the 46th council of europe states but more importantly the principles established in mccann have been relied on in hundreds of cases in which individuals have lost relatives due to what they alleged was a use of disproportionate force followed by in some cases a failure to investigate the circumstances of their death one need look no further than the judgment in armani de silva against the united kingdom to understand the value of the general principles on the right to life established in mccann whether you agree or disagree with the majority judgment armani de silva concerned the mistaken identification as a terrorist and the subsequent killing in the london underground of a young brazilian the strazburg court has always been conscious of its limited external and supervisory role it pays due deference to the assessment of national courts when they have assumed their convention obligations and crucially to national democratic processes provided that the national legislature paid heed to the convention rights and principles and struck a fair balance between individual rights and the public interests however the court has also held that although individual interests must on occasion be subordinated to those of a group democracy in europe in the 21st century doesn't simply mean that the views of a majority must always prevail thus for instance in a case concerning the absence of any form of legal recognition and protection for same-sex couples in russia the court didn't accept in a judgment delivered last year that the attitude of the russian population namely widespread opposition to same-sex relationships could be taken as a decisive argument for its assessment under article eight of the convention which relates to the right to family and private life and follow on judgments requiring effective protection of same-sex couples were handed down by chambers in the court in the ensuing months in cases against romania ukraine belgaria and poland in recent years the court has also sought to respond to the type of democratic erosion and rule of law backsliding which we're now witnessing in some european states it has recently dealt with the protection of the autonomy and independence of the judiciary in cases against albania belgium bulgaria georgia hungary iceland the republic of maldova poland romania turkey and ukraine this list of respondent states is or some of which are our eu partners or remember prospective partners the list is unfortunately longer than one would have expected or indeed hoped in 2024 to give one example the applicant is well known to you the end of last year the court found violations of different convention articles in a case which had been brought against poland by lek valenza the former leader of solidarnosk he'd suffered the reversal 10 years on of a final defamation judgment in his failure in his favor following an appeal by the prosecutor general and the court regarded that appeal as and i quote an abuse of the legal procedure by the state authority in pursuance of its own political opinions and motives the judgment in valenza was a pilot judgment and this is a tool which we developed faced with thousands and thousands of applications to help identify and correct systemic or structural problems pilot judgments have allowed the court to treat a multitude of issues from prison overcrowding in italy and belgium to the systemic slowness of judicial procedures in hungarian bulgaria or systemic and truly brutal violence against women in russia but valenza against poland is also a judgment which speaks to the possibility of change the newly elected government has publicly declared and wrote to me as president shortly after its election it's an intention to execute this and other strazberg judgments on the rule of law and in the current environment as a court president i grab hold of every green shoot that i see during my time in strazberg there's been a marked increase in use of article 18 of the convention and this provision is part of what i would call our nuclear arsenal a violation of article 18 is found where the respondent state is held to have violated human rights for an all lawful ulterior purpose it's been particularly noticeable in cases brought by prominent opposition politicians human rights defenders who i would like to salute here today and journalists a short roll call speaks for itself nevalny now deceased dimartash and kevala still in jail mammadoff and jaffer off from azerbaijan timoshenko from ukraine mirabish philly from georgia the court found violations of article 18 in their cases in relation to detention and or criminal prosecution on various charges often fictitious and primarily aimed at silencing their political or opposition activity and in the last two years violations of article 18 have also been found for the first time in cases about the disciplining of judges or prosecutors in poland and vulgaria allow me to close this excursus into politics on a less somber but nevertheless i think striking note namely the situation where politicians who to put it diplomatically and i have to be are skeptical of the convention system and the european court nevertheless have recourse to the court and the convention when the need arises in their own lives i'll remain cryptic and leave you to search in the database for some examples as a court of law we are charged with interpreting and applying the law of the convention whilst often nowadays more often than not navigating what are very choppy political waters the repatriation of children and isis brides from the camps in syria the prohibition on wearing the kneecap in public the imposition of interim measures in relation to an asylum seeker placed on a flight to rwanda or the display of a crucifix in public schools in italy politics are never far from our courtroom but politics is not what we do the judgments issued by the court are as i said challenging but that's what they're intended to do challenge individual and systemic failures to respect the shared european values of democracy respect for human rights and the rule of law to which the states parties sovereignly subscribed turning finally and i realize i'm a longer speaker than you had hoped to the very necessary nature of the convention it's easy to refer to the cases i've just touched on and the legal issues they raise and assert that a state like ireland after 50 years of eu membership and over 70 years of hopefully helpful guidance from the strassberg court has no real need anymore for the convention's apparatus ours is a state blessed although you wouldn't always have that impression when you read the newspapers with independent and impartial courts and an effective functioning democracy as regards cases pending before the court we now rival the uk in terms of a telling statistic namely the number of applications pending in relation to a given state per 10 000 inhabitants the convention average is 0.41 ireland is at 0.04 with the uk on 0.03 and only germany close by on 0.05 this is a sign that the job is in the main of course this can be open to discussion being done at domestic level and that's exactly what the convention system is intended to achieve however the over 26 000 judgments issued by the strassberg court are testament to the fact that all societies including our own have their blind spots their one off or systemic dysfunctions and a need as a louder packed put it for an external eye to verify compliance with the rule of law and international legal obligations let's not forget the changes introduced into irish law or felt in irish society directly or indirectly as a result of strassberg judgments and i'm deliberately leaving aside what i refer to as the big name cases like norris okif airy or a b and c think of the new legislative and judicial framework to ensure the protection of persons in psychiatric detention and young offenders in need of special care think of the reforms taken to reduce length of proceedings in response to critical assessments in strassberg extending over a period of many years culminating in the okalahan judgment from 2021 penned by john macminamon think of the protection of national fathers in matters of adoption of their children following the keegan judgment or the adoption of legislation equalizing the rights of all children whether born within or outside marriage in the areas of guardianship maintenance and property rights which was a development spurred by the johnston judgment and think of the change in legal practice crafted by the irish supreme court but following the second judgment in independent newspapers so as to safeguard against the acknowledged risk of excessive jury awards in defamation cases and the effect of that on freedom of expression society's underdogs and its elites have both been able to rely on the hope of external judicial assessment which the convention offers and as the devastating war rages in ukraine one of the most critical contemporaneous contributions that the convention can bring to the hope of stability and order on our continent is its capacity to serve as an instrument of peace and as a guardian of effective and pluralist political democracy now is not the time to abandon one of the most effective mechanisms produced by the post-war international rules based order a mechanism which is there to bolster democracy and safeguard the rule of law across a convention legal space in which over 700 million people reside thank you very much