A Milestone in Europe's human rights history is passed today with the formal transformation of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg into a full-time court whose writ will run from Vladivostok to the Atlantic, upholding the rights of some 700 million "Europeans".
The court, the largest international tribunal in the world, and unique in allowing the direct right of petition to all individual citizens once domestic remedies are expended, operates under the ambit of the Council of Europe (and is not to be confused with the EU's European Court of Justice in Luxembourg).
The new court, whose function is to uphold the European Convention on Human Rights in the 40 signatory states, takes over from two part-time institutions, the old ECHR and the European Commission on Human Rights which vetted the admissibility of cases for the court.
Pressures from a massive backlog of cases and delays had led to calls for reform of the system.
The new court takes over some 93 incomplete cases from the old and a caseload of 7,000 from the Commission.
Already this year some 4,475 new applications to the court have been registered, the same as in the whole of last year. In part this is due to the increase of 23 in the number of contracting states since 1990, all of them, except Andorra, in central and eastern Europe.
Although many cases have been lodged from these new democracies, rulings have yet to emerge. Delays of up to six years in getting a judgment from the court were "totally unacceptable", said Mr Hans Christian Kruger, secretary-general of the Council of Europe.
He said he hoped the reformed structure would bring down the average time taken to get a judgment to three years.
The new Irish member of the court, Judge John Hedigan, joins 39 others in four "chambers" of 10 which will rule on most cases. A grand chamber of 17 judges will sit on matters of particular significance.
Ireland, which signed the convention in 1950, was the subject of the court's first ruling in 1961 (Lawless v Ireland), a case about the detention of an alleged IRA member in which the court found for the State.
Since then there have been 252 Irish applications, of which the Commission ruled 12 admissible.
