The current policy of the European Court of Human Rights pursues a widespread use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. In 2019, a mandatory 12-week-long phase of friendly settlement negotiations was introduced. If the applicant does not conclude a friendly settlement, the state can still issue a unilateral declaration in his case. Such a declaration means the ending of the proceedings before the the Court, regardless if the applicant agrees with the content of the declaration. The criticism of such an approach relates to the fact that it enables friendly settlements in cases of serious systemic violations of convention rights. Because of that, the master's thesis deals with violations of the right to a trial within a reasonable time arising from paragraph 1 of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights as Slovenia was in the past already recognised as systemic violator of this right in Lukenda. Slovenia had to adopt measures to prevent further violations of this right. Several friendly settlements were also concluded on Slovenia’s behalf. The master's thesis compares the Slovenian situation to two socially comparable countries, Croatia, and Serbia. The Court issued several judgments against both of these countries and recognised a violation of the right to a trial within a reasonable time. However, most of the cases brought by these two countries were settled. The findings on effectiveness of the Convention regarding the right to a fair trial within a reasonable time is based on the data from concluded friendly settlements in these countries and reports on the actual situation regarding this type of violation. In this way, the master's thesis determines the correlation between the reduced effectiveness of the Convention and the number of concluded friendly settlements referring to the right to a trial within a reasonable time.
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