In 2025, 385 of the 397 applications against the United Kingdom dealt with in Strasbourg were declared inadmissible or struck out. One British case illustrates the difficulty facing litigants better than that 97% rate: two people brought end-of-life complaints to the Court, and each was met with the same word, “inadmissible”, for different reasons.
A client puts a UK Supreme Court decision on the table. His case raised an important question. Experienced judges examined it. He wants to know how Strasbourg could still tell him that his complaint is inadmissible. To explain it, I would start with two questions: what question of law had the Supreme Court agreed to examine? And what personal interference is he now asking the European Court to find? Sometimes a divergence on a single point between the two answers is enough to change the outcome of the application.
The Court’s United Kingdom profile for 2025 records 397 applications dealt with. Of these, 385 were declared inadmissible or struck out, 371 of them by a single judge. The remaining 12 applications were decided in 10 judgments1. These figures cover all British applications dealt with during the year. They measure neither a client’s chances after an appeal to the Supreme Court nor the exact number of applications rejected for non-exhaustion. A strike-out may, for example, follow a settlement providing for the payment of compensation.
In my own practice, across all countries, I estimate that I must tell about nine in ten people who bring me a file with a view to Strasbourg that I will not be able to lodge their application because of an admissibility obstacle. The reasons vary. For one, the precise complaint was not maintained. For another, the time-limit has expired. For a third, the documents show a serious dispute about the facts but do not demonstrate an interference with a protected right. That is why a general percentage, however high, never replaces the individual explanation owed to the client.
At the permission to appeal stage, the UK Supreme Court in principle looks for an arguable point of law of general importance that deserves its consideration at that time2. Counsel must therefore explain why a question goes beyond the client’s own dispute. In Strasbourg the perspective shifts. One must identify how a person was affected by an alleged violation of the Convention, what the national courts were asked to do about it and what the file can establish. A question of principle admirably framed for the Supreme Court may leave in the shadow a fact that is decisive for the European application.
The reverse is also true. A case may be of vital importance to one person, regardless of whether it raises a new question for the whole United Kingdom. It must then be determined, under the applicable procedure, which domestic remedies were available and effective. A decision refusing a party permission to have a ground it properly raised examined is not the same as that party’s choice to abandon the ground. Only the pleadings and the decisions make it possible to tell the two apart.
Paul Lamb, severely paralysed, wished to be able to ask a court to authorise a third party to administer a lethal substance to him with his consent. For him, what was at stake was being able to decide the conditions of the end of his life. For the courts, one distinction determined the applicable law: who would perform the final act? Where the person performs it with assistance, the challenge concerns assisted suicide. Where a third party performs it in his place, the criminal law of homicide comes into play.
That second question had been argued before the Court of Appeal. It was not, however, pursued before the Supreme Court. Maintaining a challenge concerning assisted suicide did not give the Supreme Court the opportunity to decide the distinct question of the act of a third party. In its decision of 23 June 2015, Strasbourg therefore declared Mr Lamb’s complaint inadmissible for non-exhaustion3. The gravity of his situation was obvious. The obstacle lay in the path this particular complaint had taken through the British proceedings.
Jane Nicklinson, for her part, complained that the British courts had not examined the compatibility of the legislation with Article 8 as they should have done. The European Court found that, in the circumstances of the case, that Article did not give rise to the procedural obligation she claimed. It further noted that the majority of the Supreme Court justices had examined the substance of her challenge. Her complaint was declared manifestly ill-founded4. Here the word “inadmissible” covers a genuine legal answer on the scope of the right relied on.
Counsel preparing the grounds of appeal may usefully re-read the draft from the client’s point of view: if the general question is decided, what individual interference will it still be possible to identify in our pleadings? Where several complaints are in play, it is important to distinguish those that are maintained, those for which permission to appeal is sought and those that are abandoned. A strategic choice may be entirely justified at national level. Its effect on a possible European application nonetheless deserves to be explained to the client while he can still discuss it.
For the lawyer who comes in after the final decision, a different discipline applies. Strasbourg is not a court of fourth instance charged with choosing the most credible witness or freely reassessing expert evidence. If the client explains that a decisive witness could never be examined, one must look for the requests to call the witness, the reasons for refusal and the place of that evidence in the court’s reasoning. If he simply argues that a piece of testimony should have been given more weight, the European question will be a different one. The distinction is made by reading the documents, not by adding a reference to Article 6 after the trial is over.
What concerns me most, among the files I have to turn down, is the one in which a serious European question can still be identified, but no moment remains at which the national court was put in a position to answer it. The client then discovers a distinction that nobody had necessarily explained to him: his case did go all the way to the Supreme Court. The question he wanted to take to Strasbourg, however, stopped one level earlier. It is this distinction that Paul Lamb’s case invites every counsel to keep in mind, from the moment the grounds are drafted.
Links to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights open the official text on HUDOC: in English where it exists, otherwise in French.
These notes are general information on Convention law; they do not constitute legal advice and do not create a lawyer-client relationship.
After the final decision of the highest national court, a case may be submitted to us directly, by the client or by their lawyer.