Judgments, in perspective

At a glance

How we count. Every figure counts judgments, not applications. A judgment that decides several Articles counts under each, so the Article bars do not add up to the total, and a judgment against several States counts once for each State. Committee judgments are included; decisions are not, nor are the 3,557 decisions that Search holds. Methodology

Judgments by year and formation 🔗

Judgments delivered each year by the Grand Chamber, Chambers and three-judge Committees; the bar height is the year's total.

Dashed lines: Protocol No. 11 in force, 1 November 1998 (the single full-time Court); Protocol No. 14 in force, 1 June 2010 (Committees begin to give judgments on the merits); Russia ceases to be a party to the Convention, 16 September 2022. The final year is partial: the catalog ends at its cut-off.

Outcomes and violation rate by year 🔗

Each year's judgments split by outcome, as shares of 100%; the line is the share with at least one violation.

Committee judgments (since 2010) apply well-established case-law and nearly always find a violation, so they push the overall rate up: compare the formations above. Years with fewer than 20 judgments in the selected formation are faded and have no rate. The final year is partial. Not an application success rate. How to read this

Outcomes by respondent State 🔗

Every respondent State, in the columns of the Court's own table Violations by Article and by State as far as the HUDOC metadata allow. Click a column heading to sort.

Violation rate = judgments with at least one violation ÷ all judgments against the State. Other = judgments with no violation or no-violation tag that neither strike out nor record a friendly settlement: mostly just-satisfaction judgments, and some whose HUDOC record lacks the outcome tag. States with fewer than 20 judgments are greyed: their rates rest on too few cases.

Judgments and violation rate by State 🔗

The 15 States with the most judgments, and all others together. Bar length is the number of judgments, colours split it by outcome, and the label gives judgments · share with at least one violation.

State profile 🔗

Pick one to three States: their judgments by year, the Articles most often found violated and their most frequent HUDOC topics, as shares of each State's judgments so that States of different size compare.

Outcomes by Convention Article 🔗

Judgments with a violation or no-violation tag for each Article (subparagraphs count under their Article). Bar length is the number of such judgments (n), colours split it by outcome, and the label gives n · share with at least one violation.

Example: 6-1 and 6-3-d count once under Article 6; P1-1 is Protocol No. 1, Article 1. Linked tags such as 14+8 count under both Articles. Judgments without an outcome tag for the Article are left out of n: no tag does not mean no violation. A description of HUDOC metadata, not the probability of winning a claim. HUDOC tag conventions

HUDOC topics 🔗

The 25 most frequent HUDOC thesaurus keywords: the Registry's controlled vocabulary for the legal themes, Convention provisions and procedural aspects of each judgment.

Topic trends 🔗

Judgments per year tagged with a HUDOC topic: the five most frequent, the top ten, or up to ten of your choice (start typing to see the topics available). With more than five lines, hover over or click a topic in the legend to pick out its line.

The final year is partial: the catalog ends at its cut-off.

Most cited judgments 🔗

Top 20 by the judgments and decisions citing them, counted as in Search's Cited by: documents, not mentions — a judgment that refers to the case in ten paragraphs counts once. Judgments HUDOC publishes only in French are included. Under Evidence, the same ranking from HUDOC's citation metadata alone, for comparison.

Loading the citation snapshot...

Judgment types

The judgments by formation, HUDOC importance level, outcome, procedural or substantive wording in the conclusion, and share with a separate opinion.

Inadmissibility and strike-outs in judgments

Judgments whose conclusion declares part of the application inadmissible or strikes it out of the list, and the inadmissibility grounds the conclusion names.

This counts judgments only, so it is not the Court's filtering rate: most applications are declared inadmissible or struck out by a decision and never reach a judgment. Those decisions are counted in Decisions, on their own denominators. How to read this

Decisions — a separate scope

Every chart above this point counts judgments. This section counts HUDOC’s admissibility and strike-out decisions. They are searchable in this tool, but share none of the denominators used above: a decision reaches no finding on the merits, so it carries no violation and no article outcome. Read from the live corpus, so its cut-off differs from the snapshot date above. Methodology

Read this first. These are the decisions HUDOC publishes — not the Court’s filtering of applications. The single-judge formation that disposes of most of the docket publishes nothing, and this record shows it from the inside:

What a published decision actually decides

Conclusions are compound, so the mixed categories are their own buckets rather than being split across the single ones. Alternative phrasings of one outcome are folded together; HUDOC’s own misspellings are not corrected and stay under “Other”.

Strike-outs and inadmissibility over time

This tracks publishing practice as much as caseload: separate admissibility decisions became rare once the Court began joining admissibility to the merits, which is why the Admissible line all but disappears rather than the Court becoming stricter. Pre-1999 records are sparse () because admissibility was the former Commission’s task until Protocol 11, and its decisions are a HUDOC collection this corpus does not hold. The final year is partial.

Published decisions by respondent State

Volume, not performance. A high count tracks application numbers and population rather than a State’s compliance record — and half of these documents are strike-outs, which include friendly settlements resolved in the applicant’s favour.

Article 35 grounds, and why there is no chart of them