Fundamental Rights Protection through Constitutional Complaints, with Special Respect of Its Effectiveness

The institute of constitutional complaint is quite common in many European countries, but in Ukraine it appeared only in 2017. The introduction of such a remedy is due to the need to protect human rights, on the one hand, and the preventive role of the constitutional review body in relation to a significant number of complaints to the European Court of Human Rights against Ukraine - on the other. However, the “effectiveness” of such an institution in both planes is quite relative and depends on many elements. Today, the constitutional complaint implemented in Ukraine is only the beginning of a mechanism of constitutional control over violated human rights and does not play the role of an “effective” remedy at both national and international levels. This article defines the institution of a constitutional complaint as an effective remedy in the doctrine and practice of the European Court of Human Rights, as in some cases and in certain countries the Court considers a constitutional complaint an “effective” remedy within the meaning of Article 13 of the Convention on Human Rights. fundamental freedoms, but not in others. Therefore, it is important to define the criteria of “effectiveness” of an individual constitutional appeal, as well as the applicability of such criteria to the existing in Ukraine constitutional mechanism for reviewing cases on constitutional complaints. Given the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as statistics and polls, the criteria for considering a constitutional complaint as an effective remedy in the European Court of Human Rights are quite different from those established in Ukraine. In addition, the “effectiveness” of the constitutional complaint is also affected by domestic political processes, which reflect the public’s trust in certain legal remedies and in certain state bodies as a whole.

The activity of the European Court of Human Rights is investigated and the significance of the relevant practice of the European Court for the judicial practice of Ukraine is determined. It is emphasized, that a constitutional complaint serves as an effective means of protecting fundamental human rights, strengthening the rule of law and building democracy, which has already been tested in many countries around the world. The article notes that the institution of constitutional complaint significantly expands the possibilities of protecting citizens. In general, this institution is a kind of constitutional appeal, which should be understood as a written petition, submitted to the Court to review the constitutionality of the law of Ukraine (its constitutional provisions), which is used in the final court decision in the case of the subject of a constitutional rights complaint. The author also draws attention to the issues of advantages and disadvantages of a constitutional complaint and a constitutional appeal separately. Thus, one of the advantages of having a constitutional complaint is that the grounds for filing a constitutional complaint are a violation of fundamental human and civil rights. The advantages also include the fact that, unlike a constitutional appeal, which is a mechanism solely for interpreting a certain provision of the law, which excludes the possibility for individuals to apply to a constitutional justice body to declare regulations unconstitutional, a complaint directly provides such a right. However, at the same time, the model of the constitutional complaint, introduced in Ukraine on the subject, is an incomplete normative constitutional complaint, which is related to the consideration of a specific case. After all, according to it, only one type of normative legal act is subject to appeal, a law, and only the one that was applied during the trial of the person. It is stated, that ensuring the possibility of a person to take an active part in the control over the activities of higher state authorities, which is implemented in the relevant legal forms, provides grounds for recognizing a constitutional complaint as one of the modern institutions of democracy. In fact, a constitutional complaint is an effective procedural means to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens

In a recent decision, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that the constitutional complaint before the Hungarian Constitutional Court can be seen as an effective domestic remedy. This decision shows the growing role of constitutional complaint procedures even in the international system of human rights protection; therefore, it is worth examining how national laws ensure efficient access to such procedures. The current paper aims to analyse a specific aspect of this complex problem, namely, the question of legal aid in constitutional court proceedings – particularly constitutional complaints procedures – in Germany, Austria and Hungary. As a general staring point, it is intended to derive the need for legal aid from the national constitutions, followed by an analysis on the availability of legal aid schemes for constitutional complaint procedures and their conditions. The examination is based on the national legal provisions and case-law, as well as the relevant secondary literature. This comparative study can enable some conclusions to be drawn on the question of how constitutional complaints can become more efficient tools in the protection of fundamental rights for those in need, as well.

The primary purpose of the presented paper is to conduct comparative analysis of the institution of constitutional complaint within the legal systems of Poland and Germany. Within such analysis the author aims at establishment of an adequate relationship between two main goals of the constitutional complaint, such as: 1. the elimination of unconstitutional provisions and 2. the ensurance of human rights protection within two aforesaid legal systems. The secondary purpose of the article is to make attempt of the resolution of the issue which of the presented purposes shall gain a primacy while constituting an adequate model of the constitutional complaint. For the genuinity of the conducted analysis, the author will take into consideration such determinants as: the adapted model of the constitutional complaint (narrow limited only to legal provisions or wide), conditions of the admissibility of the constitutional complaint as well as competences of the Constitutional Court while hearing a certain constitutional complaint case. Such factors will subsequently be juxtaposed with the objective dataset, such as: yearly number of complaints submitted, yearly number of complaints accepted to the meritorical recognition, percentage of the complaints among all cases heard by the Constitutional Court and the average period of recognition of such complaint. The author will also refer to the level of satisfaction with the constitutional complaints efficiency in particular societies. Moreover the paper will rely upon the dogmatic analysis of the appropriate regulations regarding constitutional complaints in two abovementioned legal systems. The justification of the choice of presented subject comes down to necessity of the revision of the current Polish solutions regarding the constitutional complaint in order to ensure the icreasement of the efficiency of the human rights protection. Subsidiarily, the paper will also refer to the judicial practice of the European Court of Human Rights.

This article examines the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) approach to the exhaustion of extraordinary legal remedies and constitutional complaints in civil cases against Serbia. It explores when an applicant, alleging a human rights violation based on facts considered in civil proceedings, must exhaust such remedies to satisfy admissibility requirements. While it is generally accepted that an ordinary appeal must be used, the obligation to pursue extraordinary legal remedies – such as requests for revision or reopening of proceedings – and the constitutional complaint is less clear. The article highlights that the necessity of exhausting these remedies depends on the specific circumstances of each case and whether the remedy is considered effective. Through an analysis of ECtHR case law, the authors seek to clarify the conditions under which the Court expects applicants to exhaust these legal avenues before filing an application, aiming to identify consistent patterns in the Court’s admissibility decisions.

This article explores the effectiveness of constitutional complaint procedures as domestic remedies within the meaning of Articles 13 and 35 para. 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It examines the standards applied by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to domestic remedies in general, as well as the specific criteria relating to constitutional complaints, in order to determine what criteria are applied to assess their effectiveness. The paper focuses on the Hungarian and Polish models of constitutional complaint and analyzes the ECtHR’s relevant case-law to establish whether, and under what circumstances, constitutional complaint procedures in these two Central European countries can be considered effective domestic remedies within the meaning of Articles 13 and 35 para. 1 of the ECHR. The analysis shows that the ECtHR’s assessment of the effectiveness of constitutional complaints can shift over time, departing from an objective legal framework toward a broader and more ambiguous evaluation of institutional and political developments affecting constitutional adjudication.

The author explores the place and significance of the constitutional complaint institution in implementing international standards related to life imprisonment in the national legal system. Recently, following the development of these standards in international human rights law, the European Court of Human Rights declared that the absence of a predictable and transparent mechanism for reducing life imprisonment in Ukraine violates human dignity and contradicts Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In alignment with this perspective, in 2020, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine deemed unconstitutional provisions that prohibited parole from life imprisonment. The constitutional complaint served as a tool for Ukrainian authorities to advance the life imprisonment reform. Apart from the constitutional complaint, no other mechanism has made such a powerful influence in this process. Consequently, it is necessary to analyze the constitutional proceedings that preceded the decision and the ratio decidendi within the same decision.The paper outlines aspects of the national model of the institution of life imprisonment and international standards governing this penalty. Discrepancies in these systems are identified, and the author investigates constitutional complaints filed in response to these disparities, along with the relevant constitutional proceedings. Subsequently, the author places significant emphasis on the decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine resulting from the consideration of the aforementioned complaints. In the author’s opinion, this decision acted as the driving force behind the continued reform of life imprisonment. The work also briefly outlines the prospects and challenges of life imprisonment reform, implemented even under martial law conditions.

CIS members legislation regulating judicial proceedings on individual constitutional complaints is in the process of development, the relevant problems are debated by leading experts on national and international level. In view of the aforesaid this article is devoted to core concept of constitutional complaint - the model of complaint and contains comparative legal analysis of models incorporated in legislation of CIS members in different historical periods. The author proposes to enlarge the list of objects of constitutional complaint so that it includes all types of normative acts as well as individual acts, i.e. to introduce the model of full constitutional complaint. The named measures are aimed to strengthen protection of constitutional human rights in Russia and also to decrease the number of complaints against Russia filed to European Court of Human Rights.

Regional human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court of Human and People's Rights (ACtHPR) have become popular sites of mobilization for victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home. Besides being platforms for individual remedy, human rights courts increasingly shape social norms and state policy within countries, making them attractive avenues for rights advocates to develop new norms or to push domestic authorities to reform legislation. The judges of these courts can decide, for example, whether same-sex couples have a right to be married, if prisoners have the right to vote or receive HIV/AIDS treatment, or when a state can deport illegal immigrants to a country where they will likely be tortured. As these courts pass their judgments, they often find themselves in conflict with states that are violating human rights of marginalized groups on a large scale and are unwilling to implement international rulings. Although international human rights courts have become increasingly popular venues among victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home, we are only beginning to understand how activists play roles in shaping the development of regional human rights courts' case law—the body of judgments that shapes how judges will make their decisions in the future. We now have plenty of international relations and international legal research on the interactions between states and international courts: how judges in these courts wrestle between deferring to the interests of member state governments whose actions are on trial and sticking closely to the conventions' fundamental yet evolving principles (Alter et al., 2019; Helfer & Voeten, 2014). As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al., 2018; Sandholtz et al., 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon. Without an adequate understanding of the factors shaping activists' engagement with international courts, we risk undervaluing their strategic impact on the expansion of case law, the human rights protection of marginalized groups who cannot find remedies at home, and the domestic implementation of these judgments in an age of state backlash. In this section, we summarize the three papers contained in this symposium and their original contributions to these themes. Over the last decade, dozens of countries have erected legal barriers or started vilifying campaigns to stymie the work of NGOs (Buyse, 2018; Chaudhry, 2022). One tactic in this toolkit is the enactment of burdensome regulation on NGOs that receive funds from foreign donors as they allegedly promote foreign agendas (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013; Dupuy et al., 2021). States that frequently abuse human rights are especially prone to target NGOs that engage in strategic litigation (Hillebrecht, 2019). Most NGOs depend on foreign funding, and NGOs that litigate international cases fall disproportionately in this category, but do funders affect the selection of cases? In “Foreign Agents or Agents of Justice? Private Foundations, NGO Backlash, and International Human Rights Litigation,” Heidi Haddad and Lisa Sundstrom examine the extent to which Western donors, particularly private foundations, have encouraged NGOs in Europe to litigate at the ECtHR as a human rights advocacy strategy. They examine overall patterns of donor funding and NGO litigation records, and look in more detail at the case of Russian NGOs' foreign funding and litigation records. The analysis is extremely timely, as the Russian government's criminalization of independent civil society actors, especially in the human rights field, and their accusation that foreign funding turns NGOs into “foreign agents” have been crucial elements of the Russian regime's autocratization. This claim has also provided fuel for Russia's disenchantment with the ECtHR in recent years, contributing to the assessment of many observers that Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine was the last straw in an inevitable collision course leading to its exit from the Council of Europe. Haddad and Sundstrom debunk the idea that foreign donors are pushing NGOs toward strategies of human rights litigation. Instead, they argue, there is more evidence that NGOs themselves promoted the mechanism of international litigation as a strategy that donors later adopted. This article is a poignant reminder of the advocacy tools that Russian human rights activists and citizens have lost as a result of their government's departure from the Council of Europe, including ECtHR jurisdiction. Yet it also provides insight into the likely roles of foreign donors in other country cases where NGOs are using international court litigation as a human rights advocacy strategy, which is often a target of the ire of national governments, as explored in the next article in the symposium. When states attack human rights NGOs within their borders and/or international human rights courts themselves, how does this affect the willingness of those NGOs to take cases to international courts, and the ways in which they do so? De Silva and Plagis ask this question in their article about state backlash against NGOs in the case of Tanzania and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. A fascinating empirical question they pose is: does state backlash against NGOs increase NGO litigation at international courts (to contest state repression at those courts and use international mechanisms when domestic ones are not available), roughly in line with Keck and Sikkink's famous “boomerang pattern” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), or decrease it due to heightened fear and restricted NGO capabilities that state repression creates? Employing a process-tracing analysis of NGOs' involvement in three cases before the African Court at different stages of the Tanzanian government's backlash against the Court, De Silva and Plagis find that “two-level backlash” by states can result in both phenomena, either promoting or deterring NGO legal mobilization at international human rights courts, depending on certain conditions. The three selected cases concerning the death penalty, the rights of persons with albinism, and the rights of pregnant schoolgirls and mothers, which took place at different time periods, demonstrate a number of patterns of state backlash interacting with NGO strategies. The authors find that domestic-level state backlash deterred domestic NGOs from partnering with international NGOs in litigation, but that such backlash, when it repressed domestic political and legal mobilization opportunities, actually encouraged both Tanzanian and international NGOs to turn to the African Court more frequently to seek remedies. International-level backlash in turn only deterred NGOs from international litigation when such backlash consisted of state efforts to restrict NGOs' ability to engage in litigation, and not when the international backlash was in the form of routine noncompliance with African Court rulings. Importantly, the authors find that NGO responses to state backlash were significantly shaped by their degree of legal consciousness and expertise with the rules, proceedings, and workings of the African Court. Those NGOs with less knowledge and experience were more likely to back away from engaging with the Court under the pressure of state backlash. De Silva and Plagis conclude that “NGOs' persistent human rights advocacy in the face of state backlash is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that they may not be deterred by state backlash initially, but there is a danger that their continued determination to engage in international litigation could prompt governments to engage in even more severe forms of backlash, with critical impacts on international courts and already vulnerable human rights defenders. Rights advocates have a growing menu of institutions and courts available to them. How do activists choose at which institution to lodge their cases in a world where legal remedies have diversified, or as some have argued, fragmented (Koskenniemi & Leino, 2002)? In “What Makes an International Institution Work for Labor Activists? Shaping International Law through Strategic Litigation,” Filiz Kahraman goes beyond the tendency of legal mobilization studies to only examine how activists interact with a single court or institution. Instead, Kahraman opens up how rights advocates imagine which institution is most receptive to their claims. Drawing on a comparative interview study of British and Turkish trade union activists and their legal mobilization campaigns at international courts and quasi-judicial institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), Kahraman examines how activists first probe and then strategically identify which court or international institution is most susceptible to their primary goals of influencing structural reforms and setting new norms. Through this probing process—or dynamic signaling game between courts and litigants—activists push a court's jurisprudence and case law into new issue areas. For instance, at the ECtHR, Turkish trade unionists challenged domestic courts' ruling that public sector workers did not have the right to establish unions, even though the ECtHR had no established case law on labor rights in 1990s. They won the case, with the ECtHR finding that Turkey violated the right of public sector workers to unionize. These cases not only had an impact within Turkey, but over the next decades, similar cases brought by British unionists would spin off the early precedent set by the Turkish legal mobilization efforts. Kahraman argues that they ultimately pushed the ECtHR to recognize the basic trade union rights as fundamental human rights. Kahraman sheds light on the often hidden strategies behind international litigation. Activists litigate not just for the immediate impact on the current case they work on, but how they envision that all the cases they work on may shape norms and domestic structural reforms further in the future. Whether an institution is perceptive of claims lies in the eye of the beholder. Kahraman finds that besides targeting institutions with high compliance rates, they also take cases to institutions with low rates of compliance, especially “if these institutions have extensive judicial authority to create new international norms.” So, it is not the de jure protection set by an international courts, but rather how activists perceive the juridical responsiveness and judicial authority of courts—or, how judges adopt either an activist approach or restraint in response to incoming cases and how willing states are to implement cases of a court, respectively—that determines why activists select certain courts or quasi-judicial institutions (like the ILO). Kahraman gives us new tools to interpret how activists perceive authority and receptiveness and respond to opportunities. Rather than static external legal remedies, courts and quasi-judicial institutions are opportunity structures that are malleable to the strategic vision of the activist or litigant. The articles in this symposium together reveal a number of key overlapping insights. At the broadest level, they demonstrate that activists' behaviors and strategies influence international courts' jurisprudence, politics within states, and the human rights outcomes of everyday citizens—and these influences have often been hidden in our existing canon of research on international courts. In addition, all of these articles show that, while activists may face challenges in their efforts, often including significant backlash from their home state governments, they also continue to retain significant agency through their creative efforts to develop legal strategies and circumvent state repression. Activists perennially innovate: sparking the ideas that inspire donors who fund them; calculating how to continue their litigation work when government actors threaten them; and taking risks in litigation to push courts to expand how they define human rights. However, along with these uplifting conclusions, there are worrying patterns that demand future research. States are increasingly pushing back against the powers of international courts to bind them to costly measures, and as this symposium has shown, national governments often point to activists as contributors to this “problem” of invasive international human rights standards. A growing body of research has tracked how human rights defenders of all kinds globally are under threat from actors like governments and corporations who disagree with their contentious actions. We need more studies that gather comprehensive data and systematically track these threats, specifically with regard to activists who engage in international human rights litigation. We suspect that such activists are likely disproportionately targeted due to the international visibility of their complaints. We also desperately need research into possible innovative responses to these threats to activists—responses from activists, funders, governments of countries that support human rights, and international courts themselves. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the Toxic Crimes Project. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She is the director of the ActinCourts network at UBC and conducts research on legal mobilization by Russian activists.

In This Issue

Regarding the issue of the unity of the protection of fundamental rights in Europe, it is necessary to review the content of the European Court of Human Rights precedents on the conflict between the protection of privacy in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the freedom of expression in Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights, as shown in the the European Court of Human Rights' rulings on Hannover v Germany in 2004 and no. 2 and no. 3. With regard to these rulings it needs to be reviewed first and foremost whether German courts have accepted its obligation to protect rights of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Human Rights Court's specific judgment standards established through its judicial precedents. The legal review of whether or not the courts of the member states of the Convention accept the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in terms of fundamental rights dogmatic and fundamental rights theory is whether the scope of discretionary evaluation recognized by the courts of contracting state related to the guarantee of the European Convention on Human Rights is violated. The precedent of the European Court of Human Rights, which applies the public person doctrine only as a standard for legal interest balancing test to resolve cases of conflict of fundamental rights, cannot be cited as theoretical basis that public persons receive less or weaker protection of privacy rights than ordinary persons, or that there is legal basis for justifying discriminatory treatment for their privacy rights protection. Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which does not apply public figure doctrine as a means to determine the scope of protection of the right to privacy of public persons, but only uses it as a quantifying weighing factor with other rights or public interests suggest that the right to privacy of public figures is not guaranteed in the form of an unlimited absolute right, but a provisional right (prima-facie- Recht). It means that the scope of protection of public figure’s privacy right as a fundamental right is determined in the process of balancing test between two coflicting fundamental rights, such as privacy rights and freedom of expression, or the public interest, which is in conflict with it.

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The article is devoted to the issues of reproductive human rights in the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and their impact on the practice of law enforcement and constitutional-legal doctrine in Ukraine. It emphasizes that personal reproductive rights are an important element of the system of fundamental human rights. Judicial practice, including the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, has a significant impact on the regulation and implementation of reproductive rights. A priority area for the development of Ukrainian legislation is the study of the possibilities of using judicial practice in the fiel of protection and safeguarding reproductive rights. A key issue in this regard is the scope of the regulating influence of precedential rulings concerning reproductive rights, as reflected in the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. It is noted that referring to this practice is becoming a common legal practice among participants in judicial and administrative procedures. At the same time, a problem arises in applying judicial practice to relationships that are not independently regulated by law in Ukraine due to the absence of a separate legal act governing assisted reproductive technologies. It is emphasized that such a national legal act should adhere to the principles outlined in the precedential decisions of the European Court of Human Rights related to reproductive rights. The current law enforcement practice of the European Court of Human Rights demonstrates its use of a well-developed methodology for interpretation based on the consensus (legal harmonization) method, i.e., combining the interpretation of international acts and agreements with the practice of member states’ national legal systems. At the same time, the analysis of constitutional interpretations reflected in national legal systems is also important. At the level of constitutional-legal doctrine, it becomes important to form theoretical approaches to understanding the interpretative mechanisms for applying the precedent law of the European Court of Human Rights, specifically in the area of reproductive rights.

If the Supreme Court applied the legal provisions declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, as a Constitutional Court in order to quickly and efficiently relieve the fundamental rights of the people and at the same time secure the effectiveness of the unconstitutional decision, It would be necessary to cancel not only the Supreme Court's judgment but also the original administrative disposition at the same time. In order to file a constitutional complaint against not only administrative disposition but also court trials, in accordance with the principle of supplementation, the final judgment of the final trial is subject to judgment in principle. However, the res judicata of the court does not reach a direct constitutional issue, that is, a judgment on whether fundamental rights are violated in principle. The principle of supplementation only requests administrative disposition to preferentially receive relief from rights through court trials. And it cannot be immediately concluded that even a constitutional complaint against the original administrative disposition itself that caused the trial was excluded from the legal text “excluding judgment of the courts.” There is no reason to deny the constitutional complaint against the original administrative disposition if the court has caused the irrevocable result of the judgment that used the original administrative disposition as the subject of judgment. The judgment of dismissal of the retrial is because the only procedure in which the judgment subject to retrial can be canceled was blocked by denying the binding force of the limited unconstitutional decision. The attitude of the current Constitutional Court Act on constitutional complaints does not deny the constitutional complaint against the original administrative disposition in accordance with principle of the original disposition of the revocation suit. It would be reasonable to regard the exclusion of trials from the subject of constitutional complaints in principle as prohibiting only constitutional complaints against the trial itself. Constitutional complaint against the ruling on the administrative appeal is illegal unless the ground is that the ruling itself has a unique reason for unconstitutionality. However, if a constitutional complaint is filed against the ruling itself due to its own reasons for unconstitutionality and illegality, it can be argued by filing a revocation suit, making it illegal against the principle of supplementation.

The study aimed to analyse how the Ukrainian legal system implements the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as to identify problems and prospects for improving this process. The article used methods of legal analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, comparison of national legislation with the European Convention on Human Rights, analysis of the statistics of the European Court of Human Rights, research on the implementation of European Court of Human Rights decisions at the national level, hermeneutics to identify terminological gaps, analysis of the implementation of European standards in the national legal system, and deduction to identify key issues in cases against Ukraine. An analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights revealed numerous systemic human rights violations in Ukraine, particularly in the areas of conditions of detention, unlawful arrests and lengthy court proceedings. Problems with non-enforcement of court decisions and violations of the rights to liberty and dignity have been confirmed by numerous cases, such as Gongadze v. Ukraine and Kharchenko v. Ukraine. Amendments to the Criminal Code of Ukraine following the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, in particular the limitation of the term of pre-trial detention, have reduced the number of cases of prolonged detention The study aimed to analyse how the Ukrainian legal system implements the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as to identify problems and prospects for improving this process. The article used methods of legal analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, comparison of national legislation with the European Convention on Human Rights, analysis of the statistics of the European Court of Human Rights, research on the implementation of European Court of Human Rights decisions at the national level, hermeneutics to identify terminological gaps, analysis of the implementation of European standards in the national legal system, and deduction to identify key issues in cases against Ukraine. An analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights revealed numerous systemic human rights violations in Ukraine, particularly in the areas of conditions of detention, unlawful arrests and lengthy court proceedings. Problems with non-enforcement of court decisions and violations of the rights to liberty and dignity have been confirmed by numerous cases, such as Gongadze v. Ukraine and Kharchenko v. Ukraine. Amendments to the Criminal Code of Ukraine following the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, in particular the limitation of the term of pre-trial detention, have reduced the number of cases of prolonged detention