The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/world/europe/29russia.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=european%20court%20of%20human%20rights&st=cse has an interesting piece on Russia and the European Court of Human Rights.
Fed up with the brazen string-pulling and favor-trading in the corrupt Moscow courts, a judge named Olga B. Kudeshkina went public, criticizing the system in numerous interviews as little more than a legal bazaar — “an instrument,” as she put it, “for settling political, commercial or simply personal scores.” When Ms. Kudeshkina was then dismissed, she joined a stampede of Russians in appealing their cases to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled last month that she had been improperly disciplined. But now, it seems, that path is becoming more difficult, as the Kremlin is blocking an overhaul of the European court that is intended to reduce a multiyear backlog of cases — many of them from Russia.
… The court appears to have increasingly rankled the Kremlin by issuing rulings that highlight corruption, torture and other official misconduct in Russia, including the pervasive practice of what is known here as “telephone justice” — a politician calling and instructing a judge how to rule. The Kremlin has responded to the Kudeshkina case and others by attacking the credibility of the European court. … The court officials said the standoff with the Kremlin had turned so contentious that the court was seeking ways to adopt reforms without Russia’s permission, which would be an unusual breach of diplomatic practice. … In 2008, for example, it decided to consider in depth 1,671 cases from all the member countries.
But the process of sifting through cases is time consuming, and the changes, known as Protocol No. 14, would scale back the number of judges needed to evaluate each case initially. Protocol No. 14 was proposed in 2004, and Russia signed it in 2006. But the Russian Parliament, which is closely controlled by the Kremlin, must ratify it, and has not. Russian officials say the changes would tilt the court even more against Russia.
What is interesting about this is that international diplomatic obduracy shouldn’t be Russia’s preferred move here. Russia, like all countries adhering to the treaties underlying the ECHR, has the right to have its own national judge vote in cases involving its own judicial system. Judges are also appointed to the ECHR on relatively short terms. Together with the usual norms of state sovereignty etc, these might lead you to believe that ECHR judges will be relatively deferential to states, and that individual judges will be especially unlikely to annoy their home countries. Thus, one might expect states like Russia to resolve difficult or awkward cases through discreet and informal pressures.
Erik Voeten’s “recent piece”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2918852 in the _APSR_ (a considerably earlier and unpaywalled version is available “here”:http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/9/7/4/9/p197493_index.html – go down the page and click on “Midwest Political Science Association” to get the PDF and avoid AllAcademic GoogleAd promoting nonsense) speaks to the politics of ECHR decisions in some interesting ways. Working with a dataset of ECHR decisions, Erik finds some evidence of national bias – judges are considerably more likely to end up on the same side as their their home governments than judges from other countries, especially on sensitive issues of national security. But national bias doesn’t explain everything. Judicial philosophy is also important, even in cases where judges are pronouncing on alleged human rights violations by their own governments. Most interesting, Erik finds that:
judges from former socialist countries were about 20% more likely to vote against their own governments than were other judges. This corroborates the anecdotal evidence that these judges were particularly keen on demonstrating their independence from the government and rectifying deficiencies in their domestic human rights situations. This effect is highly robust to alternative model specifications (available from author) that include indicators of democracy (Polity scores and Freedom House scores), suggesting that it truly reflects the different motivations of judges from former socialist countries.
What this suggests is (1) that judges on the ECHR can be influenced by the governments that have appointed them, but (2) that these judges at best imperfectly reflect their governments’ preferences, and (3) that judges from former socialist countries are _especially_ likely to want to demonstrate their independence. It may be that judges are less independent in areas where it is hard to measure bias (such as their role in choosing which cases go forward to the ECHR), but the anecdotal evidence indicates that at least sometimes judges go against the wishes of their national governments there too. This may help explain why Russia is resorting to heavy-handed tactics to try to force the ECHR to behave in ways more amenable to its wishes – the subtler tools of influence that it might prefer to employ aren’t quite as effective as Russia would like them to be.