Draft:Pilot Judgment

Pilot judgments are a procedure in the European Court of Human Rights. First used by the court in the case Broniowski v. Poland in 2004, the stated goal of this procedure is to resolve high numbers of similar cases stemming from the same root problem. In this procedure, the European Court of Human Rights does not attempt to individually resolve each case. Rather the court uses a single case which is representative of the group to enforce a change on the national level in line with the ECHR, thereby resolving the other identical cases. The court considers those cases settled out of court by the individual nation.

Development
The pilot judgment procedure was formulated in Broniowski v. Poland to protect the right to property of about 80,000 Polish nationals who had been forced to move after World War II. Poland subsequently adopted legislation to compensate for these losses and the court adjourned the remaining applications on the issue.

In February 2011, the pilot judgment procedure was officially added to the Rules of Court. The pilot judgment procedure was implemented to increase the efficiency of the court in the face of a large and growing backlog of cases.

The procedure has been used in a multitude of ways since its formulation. Pilot judgments have most commonly been used in cases regarding prison conditions and violations of property rights (resulting from the economic transition from communism to capitalism), among other violations of the ECHR. In 2023, the European Court of Human Rights used a pilot judgment for the first time to address judicial independence through the case Wałęsa v. Poland.

Criticism
Pilot judgments have been criticized as reductive, allowing the recategorization of nuanced violations into a single group. For example, scholar Dilek Kurban argues that although the judgment in the case Doğan and Others v Turkey (not officially a pilot judgment) minimized the compensation for human rights violations. Kurban argues that the decision allowed the Turkish government to remediate violations against Kurds by monetarily compensating for their displacement, although many of the applications to the ECtHR included other violations which would require other forms of remediation.