Third-party interventions at the European Court of Human Rights
Increasing recourse to amicus curiae briefs is a powerful game-changer in contemporary judicial practice. EJIL:Talk! has closely monitored this growing practice, with particular attention to developments before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Justine Batura and Isabella Risini have analysed the value of the unprecedented number of requests for third-State interventions in what was then Ukraine v. Russia (X). Amicus curiae briefs are also a unique opportunity for academics to share their expertise with human rights bodies in relation to specialized areas of the law and complex issues of interplay between overlapping international legal frameworks. In this vein, the co-editor of this blog, Prof. Marko Milanovi?, has shared (here and here) the two amicus curiae briefs that he and Prof. Sangeeta Shah submitted, first, in Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia regarding the 2014 downing of the MH17 airliner over Ukraine and, more recently, for the merits stage of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia. In the context of its IHL Expert Pool, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights has intervened as a third party for the first time in front of the ECtHR in this (now joined) case by submitting a brief on 28th April 2023. In this blog post, we would like to share the main submissions in our intervention, and highlight its main points of convergence and divergence with the most recent one prepared by Milanovi? and Shah. By so doing, we hope to contribute to the discussion on the extremely salient issues raised by this case, and to reinforce, complement, or challenge the tremendously valuable observations made by our colleagues from Nottingham.
The Geneva Academy’s brief
The Geneva Academy’s third-party intervention focuses on three main subjects: (I) the extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) during an international armed conflict; (II) the relationship between the ECHR and international legal norms governing recourse to armed force between States (ius ad bellum); (III) the interplay between the ECHR and international humanitarian law (IHL).
Read full blog post
