Expanding Competences by Judicial Lawmaking: The Pilot Judgment Procedure of the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The institutional design of the Strasbourg system that has evolved over the last decades is an expression of contemporary debates surrounding the system's very nature and purpose. The current debate primarily bears on the range of choices that the Council of Europe faces in adapting to the changes in Europe, which largely have been caused by its expansion to cover nearly all post-Communist States of Central and Eastern Europe since the 1990s. This expansion, and with it the extension of the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) to now more than 800 million people in forty seven countries, has confronted the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) with a far broader range of human rights problems than had previously existed. By 2010, the number of pending cases had risen to 139,650 but the Court's adjudicative capacity remains limited.