What It Costs and How Long It Takes

There is no filing fee to lodge an application in Strasbourg. Proceedings are conducted in writing for most of their life, there is rarely a hearing, and there is no requirement to travel. The cost of a case is representation and the work of assembling it — nothing else.

That is genuinely unusual, and it changes the arithmetic for a creditor deciding whether an unpaid public debt is worth pursuing further. The question is not whether you can afford the forum. It is whether the file justifies the work.

• Assessment — weeks

  Establishing that the decision is final, that the debtor engages State responsibility, and that the time limit has not expired. Short, and it decides whether anything follows.

• Preparing the application — one to three months

  The application form is strict and the Court rejects non-compliant files without examining them. Most of the work is documentary: the judgment, the enforcement attempts, the record of what the authorities did and did not do.

• Communication to the State — the long wait

  The Court decides which cases to communicate to the respondent government and when. This is the phase measured in years, and it is outside anyone’s control.

• Observations and judgment

  Once communicated, the exchange of observations is comparatively quick. Many non-enforcement cases are then decided by committee under well-established case-law rather than by a full Chamber.

• Execution — months to years after the judgment

  Payment is due within the period set in the judgment, and compliance is supervised by the Committee of Ministers. Where a State is a repeat offender, this phase needs to be worked, not waited out.

Three things, in order. How complete the domestic record is when it reaches us — a well-documented enforcement history costs a fraction of a reconstructed one. Whether the exhaustion question is contested. And whether the case is one the Court can dispose of under settled case-law or one that requires argument on an open point.

From lodging to judgment, a straightforward non-enforcement case against a State with an established line of authority is a multi-year process, and we do not present it as anything else. What we do commit to is that the assessment phase is fast and conclusive: you will know early whether the case is admissible, and if it is not, you will not spend money finding out slowly.