Concurrent applications before the European Court of Human Rights: coordinated settlement of massive litigation from separatist areas

“Concurrent applications” are defined as claims filed with an international court by several individuals and/or a State or States concerning the same factual context, and directed against one or several States, while a substantially analogous matter has already been submitted to one or more other procedures of international investigation or settlement. Concurrent applications are especially common from separatist areas, because the international or internationalized armed conflict allows victims of human rights violations to use multiple procedural possibilities to obtain remedies for the same breaches of international law. Considering that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been seized by thousands of applications from separatist areas, several experts proposed to create “separate mechanisms or other means” to deal with those concurrent applications instead of using the case-by-case approach of individual justice. The paper submits that the settlement of concurrent applications from separatist areas is feasible through the strategic use of existing procedural tools of the ECtHR without introducing a separate mechanism or further constitutionalizing the Convention to the detriment of individual justice: the Court should settle such concurrent applications in a coordinated way, taking into account the interconnected legal and factual background as well as procedural and substantive law questions of concurrent cases in individual procedures.