STRASBOURG, France (CN) — Europe’s top rights court refused to take the first case about pandemic restrictions on Monday, finding the trade union that brought the case failed to meet admissibility requirements.
The European Court of Human Rights rejected the complaint from the Geneva Community of Trade Union Action because the group had not brought it to the court within a six-month deadline, or given Swiss courts a chance to address the issue.
Court president Síofra O'Leary read out the decision in French.
The trade union claimed Switzerland was too aggressive with its pandemic restrictions. In particular, the group felt Geneva overstepped when it forbade the union from holding its 2020 May Day gathering.
"The government's priority was to maintain economic activity, not to protect people," the union's lawyer, Céline Moreau, told the Strasbourg-based court during hearings in April.
A lower chamber sided with the union in 2022, marking the first time the court had found fault with government policies taken during the pandemic.
Switzerland told the 17-judge panel that chaos in the early days of the pandemic meant that the government had to act with limited information. Switzerland borders the Italian region of Lombardy, which was hit hard by the virus in the early days, and the only measures governments had available to combat the pandemic were social distancing and reducing contacts.
“It’s clearly a court trying to steer away from passing judgment on the merits about the pandemic,” Isabella Risini, a visiting professor at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, told Courthouse News in an interview. She is involved in another case before the court over pandemic restrictions.
Five judges of the Grand Chamber were also critical of the decision. The court “passed up an opportunity to develop “crisis law” in the context of our convention, once again leaving to the contracting states a margin of improvisation which is fraught with danger and the risk of abuse, and which will find expression in a future global crisis,” the group wrote in a dissenting opinion.
The Swiss case was the first time an international court had considered pandemic restrictions.
The case Risini is involved with is still pending and a decision is expected in the spring.
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