State Third-party Interventions before the European Court of Human Rights. The ‘What’ and ‘How’ of Intervening

Contains fulltext : 169332pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)One of the third parties that can intervene before the European Court of Human Rights (Court) are the states parties to the European Convention on Human Rights themselves (ECHR). Although state third-party interventions can be a way for the states to cooperate and to enter into a dialogue with the Court, these interventions have received little attention in the debate about the relationship between the Court and the states of the past years. This article focuses solely on such interventions from two perspectives. It describes first the ‘what’ of intervening, including the categories of cases that attract interventions, the content of the interventions and the Court’s references to the interventions, based on the 59 cases in which states have intervened so far under Article 36(2) ECHR. After that, the article gives reasons why states do (in practice) intervene and why they should intervene (from a normative perspective). Recommendations as to how these interventions can be stimulated are given in the final part of the article.22 p