Appeal for review as an instrument of execution of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments: past, present and future

Abstract

The subsidiary nature of the complaints lodged with the Strasbourg Court, due to its international nature, has made its judgments’ enforcement a major challenge for the development of the system of the Rome Convention over the medium- and long- term. The required exhaustion of every domestic remedy before filing the complaint with this international court makes the enforcement of its judgments extremely difficult, taking into account the final character of the judgments of the national courts. In Spain, we have taken more than thirty years to design a procedural mechanism that incorporates, as an explicit basis for reopening domestic proceedings, the concurrence of a judgment from Strasbourg. And the use of the appeal for review to that effect was already criticized before the recent reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary Power. It remains to be seen whether these criticisms have been overcome after the reform and whether the appeal for review is the definitive solution for the highly controversial issue of implementation of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.