Page - 19 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2020

ALJ 2020 Benedek 18 In the “Greek case”, the European Commission on Human Rights took an active position in reviewing the state of emergency and found that it was not justified. This was also the position of the Assembly at the time. This case could serve as guidance for a more active role of Council of Europe bodies today, including a review of the justification of a state of emergency and the proportionality of the measures taken as suggested by PACE. V. General Conclusions and Recommendations What are the lessons learned, what is the message of the “Greek case” – that member states devoted to human rights make full use of existing remedies? The system of human rights protection knows strong elements of “peer review”, in the UN since 2006 in the form of the recurrent Universal Periodic Review and in OSCE since 1989 and 1991 respectively in form of the Vienna and Moscow Mechanisms, to be employed by concerned participating states. But a comparison between the judicial inter-state complaint of the Council of Europe and the non-judicial Moscow Mechanism shows large differences: the decisions of a judicial mechanism cannot be so easily ignored; could an increased use of inter-state cases lead to self-suspension like in the “Greek case”? Is there a danger that the threats of withdrawal of the Russian Federation or the UK being unhappy with certain decisions will be realized? There are several interstate-cases before the Court as much as the Russian Federation is concerned, like Ukraine v. Russia and Georgia v. Russia but they are not of the same nature as the Greek case because they all pursue specific state interests. It is also of great importance that hundreds of individual cases every year are decided against the RF and Turkey providing their citizens with some relief and sending a message to the governments how to avoid future violations. The same is true for the findings and recommendations of the other human rights bodies of the Council of Europe. However, while the “Greek case” belongs to a period of relatively frequent inter-state applications, which is also due to the fact that individual communications and the European Court of Human Rights were not as yet generally accepted, since the merger of 1998 and the general existence of a right to individual applications, the emphasis has definitely moved to the latter. But individual applications are not best suited to deal with democratic backsliding and the preparedness of member states to use the inter-state application for the common interest of safeguarding European democratic standards is low. Generally, the impact of the system also depends on whether the state in question cares about its reputation. Otherwise, blaming and shaming has little effect. For example, the Russian Federation does compensate individuals as requested by the Court, but hardly takes the necessary legislative or other structural measures in order to prevent the same cases to come up again. The RF thus does not seem to care about the number of cases generated by this practice. With regard to Turkey, the government until about 2014 was very keen on claiming that there were no journalists in prison in Turkey. However, since late 2014, well before the attempted coup it seems not to care anymore about its reputation in this respect and since has one of the highest numbers of journalists in prison worldwide.76 76 According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number was 68 for 2018; see Committee to Protect Journalists, Hundreds of journalists jailed globally becomes the new normal, at https://cpj.org/reports/2018/12/journalists-jailed-imprisoned-turkey-china-egypt-saudi-arabia/ (last visited 02.12.2020).