Deputy Secretary General Bjørn Berge opened the seminar The articulation between the Convention and EU Law: past, present and future at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, alongside Síofra O’Leary, President of the European Court, and Andrius Krivas, Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the Council of Europe and Chair of the Ministers’ Deputies.

In his speech, Deputy Secretary General emphasised that domestic courts, as well as the Luxembourg and the Strasbourg Court, increasingly have to rule on similar human rights cases, albeit from different angles, given the high level of interaction between EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights. He also underlined that the EU’s accession to the Convention – a legal obligation under the EU treaties for fifteen years – remains more important than ever.