Arusyak Julhakyan gives a speech at PACE Session

The RA NA delegation is taking part in the work of the Second Part of the Annual Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) going on in Strasbourg. During the session the member of the delegation Arusyak Julhakyan gave a speech.

"Thank you, Madame Chair, and thank you, Konstantinos, for your another excellent report on this very important topic.

Dear colleagues,

During the last couple of years, we have been reflecting to the importance of implementation of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which is one of the essential problems our organization faces. So far, the European court has delivered over 33,000 judgments. However, as of February 2025, more than 6800 judgments of the Court have not been implemented and are still pending before the Committee of Ministers. This means that 21% of the Court's judgments have not been implemented by the member states, and this is a serious problem. Another crucial problem is that nearly 1150 of the unexecuted judgments have been classified as leading cases, which require general measures to be adopted to prevent a recurrence of the human rights violation.

The implementation of the interim measures is also of high importance, as they are issued by the Court only in the exceptional circumstances, where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm, for example when a person faces a threat to their life. Which means, that execution of interim measures is of higher importance. However, despite this, the Committee of Ministers has a lack of power in this respect.

Dear colleagues, I would like to remind all of us that one of the conditions for membership for Council of Europe is the respect for human rights. And the ECHR is the only abiding mechanism which is supposed to guarantee this condition, the respect for human rights. And this isn't optional - it's a fundamental commitment made when joining the Convention system.

But what we see today is that the president of Azerbaijan, one of our member states, Ilham Aliyev during an international forum titled "Towards a new world order" declares that Azerbaijan will not comply with the European Court of Human Rights rulings due to the suspension of its PACE delegation's credentials. Is this acceptable for us?

Colleagues, not implemented judgments undermine the authority and functioning of the convention system. This is why we must reaffirm the binding nature of judgments of the Court, further reinforce the execution of judgments by enhancing the means at our disposal in cases of non-compliance.

We cannot ignore the shameful statistics of the unexecuted judgments. And when I say shameful, I mean it for this Council, because it shows that this organization should have taken proper actions in either introducing new mechanisms for enforcement or by thinking about sanctions in regard of the member states, which make zero effort to comply with the conditions of membership, in this case the respect for human rights.

Thank you," the MP said.