Procedural Aspects of Shared Responsibility in the European Court of Human Rights

This article explores how the European Court of Human Rights handles human rights complaints that involve multiple responsible entities and how its procedural organisation influences its capability to allocate responsibility amongst different entities. It identifies to what extent relevant procedural rules of the Court may facilitate or obstruct multilateral dispute settlement and to what extent they may contribute to the development of the substantive law on situations of “shared” responsibility. Some key procedural aspects that are discussed are: jurisdiction, standing, joinder of cases, the “indispensable parties rule”, third party intervention, fact finding, interim orders and issues of reparation.