This article is in tended to provide a legally sound explanation of why and how the contemporary International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law legal frameworks offer tools to address the uncertain ty, lack of in formation, and the consequences thereof in relation to missin g persons and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of armed conflicts which predated the adoption of such frameworks. To this end, three scenarios will be examin ed: the contemporary claims of the families of those who were killed in the Katyń massacre in 1940; the claims for in formation and justice of the families of thousands who were subjected to enforced disappearances durin g the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the identification efforts concernin g those reported missin g while in volved in military operations in the context of the 1944 Kaprolat/Hasselmann in cident which took place durin g the Second World War. The analysis of these scenarios is conducive to the development of more general reflections that would feed in to the debate over the legal relevance of the distant past in light of today’s in ternational legal framework.
Given the whole spectrum of doubts and controversies that arise in discussions about laws affecting historical memory (and their subcategory of memory laws), the question of assessing them in the context of international standards of human rights protection – and in particular the European system of human rights protection – is often overlooked. Thus this article focuses on the implications and conditions for introducing memory laws in light of international human rights standards using selected examples of various types of recently-adopted Polish memory laws as case studies. The authors begin with a brief description of the phenomenon of memory laws and the most significant threats that they pose to the protection of international human rights standards. The following sections analyse selected Polish laws affecting historical memory vis-à-vis these standards. The analysis covers non-binding declaratory laws affecting historical memory, and acts that include criminal law sanctions. The article attempts to sketch the circumstances linking laws affecting historical memory with the human rights protection standards, including those entailed both in binding treaties and other instruments of international law.
The Polish Government’s proposal, submitted in autumn 2017, for a comprehensive reprivatisation bill revived the international discussion on the scope of Polish authorities’ obligations to return property taken during World War II and subsequently by the communist regime. However, many inaccurate and incorrect statements are cited in the discussions, e.g. the argument that the duty of the Polish authorities to carry out restitution is embedded in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocol No. 1. This article challenges that claim and analyses the jurisprudence of the Convention’s judicial oversight bodies in cases raising issues of restitution of property taken over in Poland before the accession to both of the above-mentioned international agreements. In the article I argue that there is no legal basis for claiming that there exists a legal obligation upon the Polish State stemming directly from international law – in particular human rights law – to return the property and that the only possibly successful legal claims in this regard are those that can already be derived from the provisions of the Polish law applicable to these kinds of cases. In its latest rulings, issued in 2017–2019, the European Court of Human Rights determined the scope of responsibility incumbent on Polish authorities in this respect.
This article critically evaluates the summary procedure introduced by Protocol No. 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights, adopted within the reform of the European Court of Human Rights system. The summary procedure, now set out in Art. 28(1)b of the Convention, was instituted in order to facilitate expediency and to reduce the case load of the Court. This article argues that while judicial economy is a legitimate goal, the summary procedure under Art. 28(1)b has considerable deficiencies that undermine some of the systemic goals and core values of ECHR law. There is a manifest lack of remedies vis-à-vis the choice of the procedure, choice of applicable law, and no appeals against final decisions rendered in the course of the summary procedure. Notably, the concept of “well-established case-law” seems to be neither clear nor reliable, as evidenced in the cases analysed in the article. These cases, which involve the issue of socially- owned property in Serbia, serve to demonstrate some of the significant errors in interpretation and decision-making which can result from application of the summary procedure.
The purpose of this article is to determine the relationship between the principles of subsidiarity and effectiveness and an effective remedy for the excessive length of proceedings within the legal order of the European Convention on Human Rights. The article assumes that these key principles of the ECHR’s legal order have an impact on such a remedy, both in the normative and practical dimensions. This assumption has helped explain many aspects of the Strasbourg case law regarding this remedy. Concerning the relationship of this remedy with the principle of subsidiarity, it raises issues such as: the “reinforcing” of Art. 6 § 1; the “close affinity” of Arts. 13 and 35 § 1; and the arguability test. In turn, through the prism of the principle of effectiveness, the reasonableness criterion and the requirement of diligence in the proceedings are presented, followed by the obligations of States to prevent lengthiness of proceedings and the obligations concerning adequate and sufficient redress for such an excessive length of proceedings. The analysis shows that an effective remedy with respect to the excessive length of proceedings is not a definitive normative item, as the Court consistently adds new elements to its complex structure, taking into account complaints regarding the law and practice of States Parties in the prevention of and compensation for proceedings of an excessive length.