Lunch seminar with Ezgi Özlü
Cause Lawyers before the European Court of Human Rights
Abstract
Cause lawyers are considered to be committed to lofty goals, which include protecting the rule of law and advancing human rights. Praised as the most effective human rights regime in the world and an important player in European politics, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been a topical judicial forum for lawyers who noticed the potential of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as a basis to break new legal ground in the national systems. Institutions do, however, change. Today, this Court is accepted to be self- restrained, and it has been more and more balanced and cautious about states’ concerns.
The mobilisation of the ECHR law depends on who brings which case and which cases pass the admissibility stage. The ECHR scholarship has demonstrated that most of the reform process resulted in the risk of jeopardising the very essence of the right of individual petition. Similarly, the ECtHR application is generally resource-intensive, considering the skills and time required of lawyers (for complex cases in particular, depending on the expertise of the lawyer). Social movement actors, lawyers and expert NGOs can form ‘support structures’ for individual litigants and equip them with the necessary financial means and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, not all individuals have equal access to support structures that help them reach international courts.
The research question at hand is to what extent do cause lawyers transform the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. Four broad steps are adopted for the moment: The first step will be selecting the cause lawyers that I examine in the further steps. The selection process will be through a quantitative analysis of the Strasbourg case law of the last twenty years. The second step will be a systemic analysis of these selected cases. The third step will be conducting interviews with the ECtHR Judges, Registry lawyers, and lawyers from the Execution Department. The fourth step will be a prosopographic analysis of cause lawyers as ‘professionals/actors’, their backgrounds, career paths, and their interaction with other actors. This project aims to contribute to the existing scholarship on how victims and representatives experience ECHR litigation and deepen the understanding of cause lawyering.
Speaker bio
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). Previously, she worked for the update of the memorandum of just satisfaction awards at the Department for the Execution of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and as a research and teaching assistant of constitutional law at the University of Kocaeli (from 2014 to 2016). Admitted to Istanbul Bar, she holds LLMs in human rights law (University of Strasbourg, 2017) and public law (University of Galatasaray, 2015).
Ezgi’s 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. During her stay at the iCourts, she will be working on her project about cause lawyers and human rights mechanisms.
Meeting ID: 675 1390 8072
Passcode: 163560