How many ECHR cases did Britain lose last year?

A new year, a new round of unelected-euro-judges-waging-war-on-British-justice watch.  

The European Court of Human Rights has had a relatively quiet start to 2014 in the pages of the UK press.  Somewhere, I'm sure, a Tory MP is trauchling away at the idea that the Court is systematically subverting our domestic judicial and parliamentary processes - with the bad grace of doing so as the same time as having a piffling Luxembourg jurist as its president - but the daily hate agenda seems to have shifted back from Strasbourg to Brussels. An understandable shift of emphasis, you might well think, given the approaching elections to the European parliament.

Sooner or later, however, the Court will produce an opinion which offends the blue-rosetted tribes of the House of Commons, and the europhobic victim fantasies will be dusted off and trotted out. Today, the Court has published its annual account of its work over the last year. Buried at the bottom of this substantial report is a niggling little statistic which everybody who hopes to understand the Court's real impact on Britain should have at their fingertips.  

For our illustrious Lord Chancellor and Home Secretary, every passing decision of the Court is yet more evidence of the institution's overreaching desire to subvert British democracy. Whatever the merits of a particular decision, and whatever the demerits of the legal regime being challenged, you can rely on the justice ministers of the current government to denounce it in shrill terms. 

If you are already predisposed to believe the underlying claim - that Europe is robbing us of our freedom to be beastly to beastly people - every passing precedent may appear just another casualty of "Europe's war on British justice". Doesn't it feel as if the European Court is always finding the UK in violation? Wasn't there that article just the other week about some disagreeable sod using human rights arguments to force the Home Office to give every con a weekly bath in asses' milk? This, as Phil observes over at A Very Public Sociologist, is stupid empiricism. We have to take a look at the wider picture. And that picture blows these delusions to bits.

So how many cases did Britain lose last year? Thousands? Hundreds? The Court certainly had the opportunity, taking decisions on 1,652 applications submitted against the UK during 2013. And did the malevolent band of Maltese and Andorran judges, as expected, glory in Britain's discomfort, substituting their own preferences for parliament's again and again?  Er. No. Not really.

During 2013, the Court found that the UK had violated Convention rights in just eight of these cases. If this tiny clutch of judgments represents war on British justice, I'd love to know what an acceptable number of adverse findings might be. This is two fewer adverse judgments than last year, representing an overall rate of defeat before the Court for the government of just 0.48% during 2013.   

Take a moment to take that in, and keep it in your pocket the next time a Conservative minister or parliamentarian or Express reading pub bore tries to convince you that the Court's judges are systematically undermining British democracy.  In 2013, as in 2012, this is a pitiful victim fantasy or a smokescreen: crabbit, feeble and entirely unjustified self-pity.