The Turkish Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe organized a high-level conference on the future of the European Court of Human Rights in Izmir on April 26 and 27. The conference was held at the Swissôtel Grand Efes.
Minister of Justice of Azerbaijan Fikret Mammadov heads the Azerbaijan delegation to the conference.
The two-day conference is a meeting of state representatives of all the parties to the European Convention and follows up on a similar conference in Interlaken last year. The main purpose is to take stock of the developments since then and to agree on any further steps to be taken. A consortium of human rights NGOs has issued a joint statement.
Justice Ministers and other senior officials from the 47 member states of the Council of Europe and the observer states attended the conference, together with representatives of relevant organizations and institutions.
After the opening ceremony, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Turkey and Chairman of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe Ahmet Davutoğlu, CoE Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland, and President of the European Court of Human Rights Jean-Paul Costa gave a press conference.
The Izmir Declaration will be adopted at the end of the Conference. It will take stock of the progress made on the reform and lay down guidelines for pursuing the process.
The European Court of Human Rights is at the heart of the system for the protection of human rights in Europe. Its role is to ensure the observance of the obligations of the 47 states which are party to the European Convention on Human Rights for some 800 million people. The Court makes binding judgments in cases where individuals claim that their Convention rights have been violated and that the state has not granted effective redress. Overwhelmed by applications, the European Court of Human Rights is debating how to make the system functional, mulling reforms that could help reduce the more 140,000 petitions waiting to be evaluated by the court. The High Level Conference at Izmir presents an opportunity to consider the measures needed to strengthen the Court further in the context of the Convention system as a whole, including implementation of the Convention, and of the Court's judgments, at national level.

AzerTAc