Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

Membership of the Council of Europe and whether a country is excluded is not a matter for the United Kingdom on its own. The object of the convention is to improve standards throughout member states which are signatories. In fairness, the right hon. Gentleman may well accept that despite difficulties in many areas and with certain countries, standards are progressively being raised. Whether the backlog coming from Russia is quite as high as the right hon. Gentleman says I am not sure, but I think we can say that Russia makes a substantial contribution to the number of pending cases.

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

The current backlog stands at something of the order of 165,000 cases, and 127,000 of those, as I understand it, come from Russia. Given the proposals from the right hon. and learned Gentleman and the Justice Secretary for dealing with the reforms to the European Court, can he give the House some idea of how long that backlog will take to deal with?

[The Attorney-General]

Much depends on the outcome of the reform package that we might be able to implement. There are a number of things that need to be done. First, a very large number of those cases among the total of 165,000 are non-admissible. It is a question of processing them so that the individuals concerned can be told that their cases cannot be heard and the reasons for that. When it comes to the admissible caseload, the issue for the future—clearly, we have to clear the backlog—centres on subsidiarity and the extent to which the Court relies on national courts which are correctly implementing the convention to provide the solutions. This is one of the challenges, and in doing that we also have to recognise that for many countries the right of individual petition is very important.