The first issue of 2019 of the Human Rights Law Review (vol. 19, no. 1) includes a number of ECHR-focused articles:
* Alice Donald & Anne-Katrin Speck, ‘The European Court of Human Rights’ Remedial Practice and its Impact on the Execution of Judgments’, pp. 83-117:
'This article analyses the developing approach of the European Court of Human Rights to the indication of specific non-monetary individual or general remedies and the impact of this practice on the execution of its judgments. It draws on interviews with Judges of the Court and officials in Council of Europe institutions, and a statistical analysis of pilot judgments and judgments that invoke Article 46 of the European Convention of Human Rights delivered between 2004 and 2016. The article argues that the Court’s remedial practice is fluid and pragmatic, with differences of perspective between Judges. It discusses the factors that influence judicial decision-making, and examines the implications of the Court’s remedial approach both for its ‘horizontal’ relationship with the Committee of Ministers and its ‘vertical’ relationship with states. It concludes that, from both these perspectives, the door is open to continued evolution, if not revolution, in the Court’s remedial practice.'
* Sofia Galani, ‘Terrorist Hostage-taking and Human Rights: Protecting Victims of Terrorism under the European Convention on Human Rights’, pp. 149-171:
'The 2004 Beslan school siege by Chechen gunmen and the Russian responses to the attack demonstrated the tremendous impact a terrorist attack and a state’s anti-terrorist operations can have on the human rights of victims. The violations of the victims’ human rights were examined by the European Court of Human Rights in Tagayeva v Russia (2017), which this article argues is a landmark case in that the Court placed the human rights of victims at the centre of its concerns and reinforced the idea that states remain bound by the European Convention on Human Rights in large-scale anti-terrorist operations. The principal goal of this article is to examine the positive and procedural obligations of states towards the victims as outlined by the Court and to assess how this case might shape future responses to terrorist attacks. It will be argued that when states respond to a terrorist hostage-taking, they have to focus primarily on the human rights of hostages abducted within or beyond their borders on land or at sea.'
* Philippe Yves Kuhn, ‘Reforming the Approach to Racial and Religious Hate Speech Under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights’, pp. 119-147:
'At present the European Court of Human Rights employs a two-track approach to racial hate speech and religiously offensive speech, respectively. Further, the jurisprudence under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights currently privileges journalistic or scholarly, over creative or artistic, forms of religious criticism. However, in this article it is argued that the ‘gratuitously offensive’ test for religiously offensive speech requires reform, while a consistent approach to racial hate speech cases is equally necessary. By building on Waldron’s account of the harm in hate speech, a single Article 10 test for both racial and religious hate speech is proposed. This new test focuses on harm in the sense of seriously undermining the target’s assurance to a status of equal worth in the community. It abandons the unhelpful race/religion dichotomy in the Article 10 jurisprudence, and is more responsive to the political reality of tense public discourse surrounding issues of race and religion in Europe in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis and Brexit.'
