The European Court of Human Rights was set up in 1959 under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950 to deal with the complaints brought against Contracting States in regard to breach of rights and freedoms, such as, right to life, prohibition of torture, right to a fair trial, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Subsequently, numerous additional protocols: added further rights and liberties to those guaranteed by the Convention, conferred on the Court the power to give advisory opinions, and enabled individual applicants to bring their cases before the Court.
These developments and also the political changes in the East Europe, in particular, in the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, gave rise to the accession of new Contracting States from 1990. As a result, the steady growth in the number of cases brought before the Convention institutions made it difficult to keep the length of proceedings within acceptable limits.
Because of inability of the old system to deal with the new situation, Protocol No. 11 restructured the enforcement machinery, through the fundamental amendments in organization and procedure of the Court. This Protocol which came into force in 1998, replaced the existing, part-time Court and Commission by a single, full-time Court. The aim of this paper is to introduce the competence, structure and procedure of the new Court. The paper is annexed with the tables on statistics of the cases which have been brought to the Court and also the decisions issued by the Court.
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