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 organization influences its capability to allocate responsibility among 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.