Application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)

The ECtHR (based in Strasbourg) is an international court that examines applications from individuals who claim that a member state has violated the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It helps you by formally recognising the injustices and procedural violations you suffered, opening the way to overturning your conviction.

Emphatically not. The ECtHR is not a higher Greek court. It will not retry your case from scratch, it will not re-assess the testimony as to whether or not you committed the act, and it will not reduce your sentence because it considers it harsh. It acts solely as a reviewer of the Greek state, checking whether the constitutional and European guarantees were observed during your prosecution and conviction.

Yes. The rejection of the cassation appeal by the Supreme Court amounts to the “exhaustion of domestic remedies”, which is the indispensable legal precondition for the door of the European Court to open. Once Greece’s supreme court has sealed your conviction, the ECtHR alone has jurisdiction to decide whether the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal violated your rights.

Take note: the deadline is strictly four (4) months (under Protocol 15 to the ECHR, which replaced the old six-month deadline). This period runs from the day after the publication or official registration of the finalised, fair-copy judgment of the Supreme Court in the special register, or from the day on which your lawyer was officially made aware of it.

Missing the deadline, even by a few hours, is fatal. Your application will be rejected automatically as out of time and inadmissible by a single judge of the ECtHR, without the substance of your arguments even being examined. No extension whatsoever is granted, and there is no remedy to restore the position.

Because the European Court rejects over 95% of applications as inadmissible owing to formal and technical errors in completing the official form. An ordinary lawyer tends to repeat the arguments of the Greek trial (about innocence). A specialist lawyer will isolate the legal defects and draft a pleading focused exclusively on the articles of the ECHR, all but eliminating the risk of rejection.

In digital crime or sexual crime cases, the most common violations concern Article 6 (right to a fair trial) and Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life). This happens when the Greek authorities use unlawful tracking methods, arbitrary IP identifications, or deny the defence the right to a technical examination of the primary (raw) data.

Under Article 8 of the ECHR, access to your personal data (messages, photographs, email) is strictly protected. If the Greek police carried out a seizure or a full extraction (forensic imaging) of your devices without a specifically reasoned judicial order, or if the search was extended to data unrelated to the charge in breach of the principle of proportionality, a strong ground for an application to Strasbourg is established.

Yes. Under Article 6§1 of the ECHR, the court is obliged to safeguard the authenticity of the evidence. Screenshots are an extremely fragile and easily altered form of material. If the conviction rested on mere printouts, without the Greek authorities carrying out a digital forensic analysis (digital forensics) of the primary files or the logs to confirm their authenticity, there is a serious violation of the rules of a fair trial.

This is a classic and serious violation of Article 8 (private life) and Article 6 (fair trial). If the authorities gained access to encrypted messaging apps through unlawful software (spyware), intercept tokens, or without following the lawful procedure for lifting the confidentiality of communications, the evidence is “tainted”, and its use to secure your conviction establishes grounds for vindication at Strasbourg.

The ECHR recognises that in sensitive trials (such as crimes against sexual freedom or cases involving minors) publicity may be restricted to protect the victim. However, the confidentiality of the proceedings must in no circumstances undermine the “equality of arms”. If the lack of publicity was used as a pretext to curtail the rights of the defence, Article 6 has been violated.

Article 7 of the ECHR enshrines the principle “no crime, no penalty without law”. If the Greek court applied the criminal law by analogy or interpreted it abusively (e.g. Article 348Α of the Greek Criminal Code), punishing digital drawings or depictions that do not genuinely harm a minor and involve no real children, there is serious ground for an application alleging a breach of the principle of legality.

Equality of arms (Article 6 of the ECHR) requires each side to have exactly the same opportunity to present its case. If the Greek court blindly accepted the digital report of the Cybercrime Division but rejected, without reasons, your specialist Technical Adviser (a digital forensic expert), or refused to examine his technical findings, the balance was overturned and the trial is void in the eyes of the ECtHR.

Emphatically not. Lodging an application with the ECtHR has no automatic suspensive effect on the execution of the sentence imposed on you in Greece. You remain in the position set by the Supreme Court. To freeze the execution of the sentence, the domestic procedural options must be exhausted, or the extremely rare conditions for Strasbourg’s interim measures must be met.

The pendency of proceedings before the European Court can be deployed strategically in Greece through the provisions of the Greek Code of Criminal Procedure (e.g. applications for suspension of execution under Articles 497 or 546 of the CCP). Your new lawyer will file such a request with the Greek courts, arguing that the application to the ECtHR is exceptionally well-founded and that your incarceration in prison would cause irreparable harm before the international body has the chance to rule.

Interim measures (injunctive measures under Rule 39 of the Rules of Court) apply only in cases of immediate, irreparable and imminent risk to the life or physical integrity of the applicant (e.g. deportation to a country where torture prevails). In ordinary criminal imprisonment they are granted only in extremely rare cases, mainly where the detainee suffers from a very serious illness and the prison unjustifiably refuses to provide medical care.

The procedure before the European Court is entirely free of charge as regards court costs. There are no court fees, stamp duties or charges payable to the state or the Court. The only cost borne by the applicant is the fee of the specialist lawyer who will undertake the study of the case file, the drafting of the application and the conduct of the case at the subsequent stages.

No. In 99% of cases, the procedure is examined and completed exclusively in written form (written procedure). The Court studies the application form, the documents submitted and the lawyers’ written submissions. Public oral hearings (in the Strasbourg courtroom) are held extremely rarely and only for cases of major importance affecting the whole of European law.

The initial application form and the first submissions may perfectly well be drafted in Greek (which is one of the official languages of the member states). However, if the application passes the first, admissibility stage and is communicated to the Greek government for observations, the subsequent procedure and the detailed pleadings must compulsorily be drafted in one of the Court’s two official languages: English or French.

The reasons for rejection are almost always procedural: (a) lodging out of time (beyond the 4 months); (b) failure to exhaust domestic remedies (e.g. the lawyer forgot to raise the specific constitutional complaint before the Supreme Court); (c) flawed argument, where the applicant asks the ECtHR to re-examine whether the witnesses told the truth, instead of focusing on the violation of the articles of the ECHR.

The application is initially brought before a Single Judge, who examines admissibility alone (deadlines, formal elements). If it passes, it is referred to a Committee (3 judges) or a Chamber (7 judges). The next critical stage is the “communication” of the application to the Greek government, which is invited to respond in writing to our complaints, followed by our reply before the decision is issued.

The ECtHR faces an enormous caseload. If the application is formally deficient, rejection by the Single Judge comes quickly (within a few months). If the application is declared admissible and proceeds in depth, issuing the final judgment takes on average between 2 and 4 years. Cases concerning detainees with serious health problems or exceptionally urgent matters may be given priority (Priority status).

Yes. Under Article 41 of the ECHR, if the Court finds a violation, it may award the applicant “Just Satisfaction”. This includes monetary compensation for pecuniary damage (e.g. court costs, lost income) and, above all, for the non-pecuniary damage and mental distress suffered by the accused as a result of the unjust and unlawful treatment inflicted on them.

Not automatically. The ECtHR does not have jurisdiction to annul a decision of a Greek criminal court directly, nor to order your immediate release. The Strasbourg judgment constitutes a res judicata that establishes the violation of your rights. The annulment of the conviction then takes place in Greece, through a special domestic procedure.

The ECtHR judgment is the supreme legal weapon for the Reopening of the Proceedings in Greece (under Article 525(1)(5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure). Your lawyer will file an application before the competent Greek Judicial Council, submitting the Strasbourg judgment. The Council is obliged to annul the old conviction and to order a new trial before the Court of Appeal, where the judges are bound to comply with the ruling of the European Court.

This constitutes a serious violation of Article 7 (no punishment without law) and Article 6 (fair trial). The limitation period is a substantive right of the accused. If we prove that the Greek courts (Court of Appeal or Supreme Court) made arbitrary calculations of the time of commission, or ignored the expiry of the lawful prosecution deadline in order to convict the accused, the ECtHR will intervene and condemn the state.

This is a direct violation of the rights of the defence and of the “machinery” of a fair trial (Article 6§3(b) and (c) of the ECHR). In Cybercrime, if the charge is based on digital findings but the Greek authorities refused to hand over to the defence the faithful copy of the hard drive (Bit-stream Image) or the raw log files, depriving your technical adviser of the ability to verify them, the conviction is devoid of any fair character.

Abuse (under Article 35§3 of the ECHR) exists where the applicant uses false or misleading information, deliberately conceals crucial facts from the Court, or breaches the confidential character of friendly settlements. If the ECtHR finds such conduct, it will reject the application immediately. Absolute honesty and scientific precision in the drafting are the only way.

Yes. The right to apply to the European Court is not confined to natural persons but extends to legal persons (companies, businesses). If the Greek authorities carried out arbitrary, disproportionate seizures of servers, digital infrastructure or assets without lawful basis, a violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the ECHR (Protection of property) is established.

As a rule, the ECtHR’s judgments and documents are public and are posted on the HUDOC database. However, under Rule 47§4 of the Rules of Court, in extremely sensitive cases (such as sexual offences or matters touching on minors and private life), your lawyer may submit a reasoned request for anonymity. If it is granted, your name will be replaced by initials (e.g. X.Y. v. Greece), fully protecting your reputation.