By Tobias Thienel

The European Court of Human Rights has today delivered its 10,000th judgment. That is quite some achievement. Many of those judgments have become known as landmark cases, and all will have been important to the persons bringing them. Some have even been of intense political interest, in the respondent State or even throughout Europe.

Europe itself has, of course, grown rather bigger (as far as the Court is concerned) since 1961, when the Court delivered its first judgment. That fact has presented the Court with the obvious problem of an increased workload, and today’s press release shows how it has managed to move with the times. It is remarkable to note that, about ten years ago when the 11th Additional Protocol was adopted to streamline the Court’s proceedings (not least by abolishing the Commission), the Court had delivered no more than 837 judgments. On average, that works out as less than 23 judgments per year from 1961 to 1998, and a comparatively staggering 916 judgments a year since.

Obviously, the Court still has a huge job on its hands, with many thousands of applications pending before it, many of them against the new member States in Eastern Europe, particularly against Russia. How fitting, then, that its 10,000th judgment was in a case against Russia: Takhayeva and Others v Russia. How fitting, also, that it was a case from Chechnya, a region of particular concern to the Court.