Trends and dynamics of application of the case law of the European court of human rights during the criminal proceedings: the statistical and the sociological research

In this article we have described the results of statistical and sociological observations of the application of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) during criminal proceedings in Ukraine. The purpose of this article is to identify trends and dynamics of application by national courts of the case law of the ECHR during criminal proceedings, to clarify the current state of law enforcement in this area.We conducted a statistical observation – Monitoring of the information of the Unified state register of court decisions (USRCD) on the state of application of the case law of the ECHR by national courts during criminal proceedings, which illustrates a steadily growing trend: more than 20 times from 2014 (0,1 %) to 2020 (2,24 %). We analyzed the results of the monitoring of the USRCD by territorial units and established the difference in the rates of application by the courts of first and appellate instance of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights during criminal proceedings in the first half of 2020 by 5 and sometimes 8 times between different regions of Ukraine.We conducted a sociological survey - Survey of the expert community on the application of the case law of the ECHR in criminal proceedings. We analyzed the results of the survey which indicate that 89% of the surveyed use the case law of the ECHR during criminal proceedings. We found that the average frequency of using the case law of the ECHR in criminal proceedings is 36,8 %.We propose to introduced in the USRCD a mandatory hyperlink to the decision of the ECHR to the database of the ECHR «HUDOC» in the national court decision (supported by 67,1 % of respondents); create an additional filter in the functionality of the USRCD to search for the case law of the ECHR (supported by 87,5 % of respondents); create a distance learning portal to study the case law of the ECHR (supported by 89 % of respondents)