Izmir hosted a High level Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights. At the conference, attended by the justice ministers and court experts, Azerbaijan was represented by justice minister Fikrat Mammadov.
The two-day conference was 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 Izmir Conference was the last large meeting organized as part of Turkey`s chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The opening remarks were delivered by Ahmet Davutoglu, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Turkey. Keynote speakers at the event included Thorbjorn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Mevlut Cavusoglu, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Jean-Paul Costa, President of the European Court of Human Rights, Representative of the European Union, and Thomas Hammarberg, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
Minister Mammadov highlighted reforms carried out by Azerbaijan to strengthen the protection of human rights.
The minister spoke of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. He said the occupation of twenty percent of Azerbaijan`s territory by Armenia and the emergence of over million Azerbaijani refugees and IDPS were a mass and gross violation of human rights protected by the European Convention.
The Izmir Declaration was adopted at the end of the Conference. It took stock of the progress made on the reform and laid 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 presented 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