The European Court of human rights and the pilot-judgment approach: a minor revolution is on in Strasbourg

In the case of Broniowski v. Poland, concerning the issue of the compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights of a legislative scheme that affected a large number of persons (some 80,000), the European Court found for the first time the existence of a systemic violation thereby made clear that general measures at national level were called for in execution of the judgment and that those measures should take into account the many people affected and remedy the systemic defect underlying the Court's finding of a violation. It also observed that they should include a scheme offering to those affected redress for the Convention violation. This kind of adjudicative approach by the Court to systemic or structural problems in the national legal order, described as a "pilot-judgment procedure", has been adopted in several other cases since 2004. If the official aim of this new approach is to facilitate the most speedy and effective execution of its judgments of the European Court and so to avoid repetitive cases before it, this new policy, consisting in indicating more often the general measures to be adopted by the State, is, according to the author, part of a general plan to turn the European Court of human rights into a Supreme Court; some of the measures contained in Protocol 14, which should enter into force that year, as well as the new priority given by the Court to article 46 over article 41, reveal some of these fundamental changes in Strasbourg.