EU Agency for Fundamental Rights analyzed the issue of access to justice in Europe

On 23 March 2011, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) released a report entitled “Access to justice in Europe: an overview of challenges and opportunities”. The report, which was launched in Budapest at a conference hosted by the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, analyzes the access to justice across the EU Member States comparatively and reflects the difficulties faced in this field.

FRA Director Morten Kjaerum expressed that for the rights to be made effective, victims needed to be able to enforce them by having their cases decided by a court or other similar body, but in prac-tice there were a number of barriers to that as the FRA research showed. The report provides that in 22 of the 27 EU Member States the losing side in a court case should pay the legal costs of the win-ning side, and the risk of losing puts victims off bringing cases before the court.

In the report, Greece is mentioned in relation to non-execution of final judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and it is stated that in a number of EU Member States including Greece, there exist problems with non-execution of final judgments of ECHR. Related to the sub-ject matter, Halit Habipoğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF): “Among other problems confronted in accessing to justice in Greece, length of proceed-ings is one of the major problems that need to be addressed... There exist serious problems in Greece in relation to non-execution final judgments of ECHR. Although there are three final judg-ments convicting Greece of violating freedom of association, the legal personalities of those associations, which had been dissolved on the grounds of using the term “Turkish” in their names, have not been restored yet. During the 75th session the UN Committee on the Elimination of Ra-cial Discrimination (CERD), in which ABTTF also participated and submitted a parallel report, the problem of non-execution of final judgments of ECHR in Greece had been also discussed. The rep-resentatives of the Greek State at the session had expressed that they had been trying to find a solution to the regarding problem. However, during the time passed, there has been no progress in relation to the problem of non-execution of final judgments of ECHR”.

The full text of the concerning report can be retrieved at: http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/report-access-to-justice_EN.pdf