Human Rights Class Actions: Rethinking the Pilot-Judgment Procedure at the European Court of Human Rights

摘要

For decades, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has served as a bright beacon of hope for advancing human rights. Yet in recent years, a flood of applications has threatened to drown the institution entirely. In an effort to stay afloat amid the growing tide of cases, the Court instituted the so-called "pilot-judgment procedure." Through this procedure, the Court attempts to address systemic violations on the domestic level that give rise to large numbers of repetitive applications by adjudicating an individual case. The procedure addresses the problems created by repetitive applications, which overburden the Court and cause delays in hearing individual applications that raise novel and grave human rights violations, thereby impeding the Court's efforts to protect individual human rights. The pilot-judgment technique has been heralded as a bold and innovative response to these problems and has succeeded in stemming the tide of cases.