The quest for efficiency of the European Court of Human Rights

Efficiency is widely believed to be a panacea for reducing the number of pending cases and the backlog at the ECtHR, but what increasing the ECtHR’s efficiency means, is surprisingly unclear. The lack of a clear concept of efficiency exposes the ECtHR to political pressure to review individual applications according to certain indicators in order to be considered efficient. The book explores the notion of efficiency beneath the response to repetitive cases and the docket crisis in addition to shedding light on the statistics, budget and procedures. It draws up a roadmap for conceptualizing the ECtHR’s efficiency and makes the case for clearly distinguishing between efficiency, performance and perceptions thereof.