The Costs Policy of the European Court of Human Rights: From Judicialisation to Judicial Restraint with Ezgi Özlü

This seminar will examine how the policy of costs at the European Court of Human Rights affects the nature of the cases brought before it. The main focus is on legal aid and the reimbursement of costs and expenses mechanisms. Eminent for the protection and promotion of human rights in Europe, both of these mechanisms have been developed in parallel with the gradual inclusion of the individual to the proceedings. Through the judicialisation process, with the broad use of the ‘equity’ principle, the Court has adopted a flexible approach. Nevertheless, managerialism and self-restraint have weakened this policy. The application of a single scale for legal aid, formalist assessment of reimbursement criteria, automatisation in decision-making, and dependence on member States demonstrate how the current costs policy limits the scope of individual application. This restriction, however, also limits the powers of the Court.

Keywords: procedural costs, legal aid, access to justice, right of individual application, judicialisation, self-restraint, New Public Management, managerialism, neoliberalism, European Court of Human Rights, victims, lawyers, vulnerability

Ezgi Özlü is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Center of European Law (University of Luxembourg). She holds a PhD from the University of Strasbourg, where she examined how procedural costs affect the right of individual application before the European Court of Human Rights. During her PhD, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law, the Department of International Public Law and Dispute Resolution (September 2019-December 2023). Her area of research covers questions relating to access to justice (e.g. legal aid, procedural costs, admissibility requirements, reparations), lawyers (e.g. legal mobilisation, legal ethics, litigation funding) and several procedural aspects of international adjudication more broadly.
 

Participate via zoom: https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/64236572774