Is the Litigation before the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights under the Influence of Private Foundations?

Some national economic policies have reduced the resources available to these NGOs from public funds for their litigation activities while increasing the number of potential breaches of human rights complaints to be lodged by NGOs. Beyond, the volume of litigation undertaken by NGOs before the European Courts has also increased, due to the introduction of amicus curiae briefings and new EU and COE member states. As their need for financial support has increased and their public funding has decreased, NGOs have become increasingly dependent for funding on private donors and on a mixt of public-private actors for their growing litigation activities. The funding of inputs is indeed backed up by certain Member States that participate in this co-funding through their embassies. While private foundations have progressively become growing stakeholders and financial contributors to the European human rights justice, this influence has been neglected in academic literature to date. This process has some effects on the protection of human rights as private founding tend to orient the applications towards specific countries (which are considered to be political and economic enemies of free trade and borderless capitalism) and domains (free election, media, terrorism, prison and minorities, ethnic and cultural minorities, refugees, LGTB…). This process is backed up by certain member states that avoid in this manner from being censured by the European Courts and from bringing inter-State cases. This process could thus seriously compromise the right of individuals to make complaints to the ECtHR and the CJEU when their fundamental rights are breached and to obtain adequate redress. To demonstrate this assumption, we use quantitative data (on litigation funding) and qualitative cases (landmark and pilot judgments, NGOs communications), official statements, press releases and privates foundations internal litigation documents and archives collected at the Rockfeller Archives Center and at the Open Society Foundation.