In September 1967, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands brought the Greek case to the European Commission of Human Rights, alleging violations of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by the Greek junta, which had taken power earlier that year. In 1969, the Commission found serious violations, including torture; the junta reacted by withdrawing from the Council of Europe. The case received significant press coverage and was "one of the most famous cases in the Convention's history", according to legal scholar Ed Bates.
On 21 April 1967, right-wing army officers staged a military coup that ousted the Greek government and used mass arrests, purges and censorship to suppress their opposition. These tactics soon became the target of criticism in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, but Greece claimed they were necessary as a response to alleged Communist subversion and justified under Article 15 of the ECHR. In September 1967, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands filed identical cases against Greece alleging violations of most of the articles in the ECHR that protect individual rights. The case was declared admissible in January 1968; a second case filed by Denmark, Norway and Sweden for additional violations, especially of Article 3 forbidding torture, was declared admissible in May of that year.
In 1968 and early 1969, a Subcommission held closed hearings concerning the case, during which it questioned witnesses and embarked on a fact-finding mission to Greece, cut short due to obstruction by the authorities. Evidence at the trial ran to over 20,000 pages, but was condensed into a 1,200-page report, most of which was devoted to proving systematic torture by the Greek authorities. The Subcommission submitted its report to the Commission in October 1969. It was soon leaked to the press and widely reported, turning European public opinion against Greece. The Commission found violations of Article 3 and most of the other articles. On 12 December 1969, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe considered a resolution on Greece. When it became apparent that Greece would lose the vote, foreign minister Panagiotis Pipinelis denounced the ECHR and walked out. Greece was the first (and until the 2022 exit of Russia, the only) state to leave the Council of Europe; it returned to the organization after the Greek democratic transition in 1974.
Although the case revealed the limits of the Convention system to curb the behavior of a non-cooperative dictatorship, it also strengthened the legitimacy of the system by isolating and stigmatizing a state responsible for systematic human rights violations. The Commission's report on the case also set a precedent for what it considered torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and other aspects of the Convention.
Background
In the aftermath of World War II, European democratic states created the Council of Europe, an organization dedicated to promoting human rights and preventing a relapse into totalitarianism. The Statute of the Council of Europe (1949) required its members to adhere to a basic standard of democracy and human rights. In 1950 the Council of Europe approved the draft European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which came into force three years later. The European Commission of Human Rights (1954) and European Court of Human Rights (1959) were set up to adjudicate alleged violations of the Convention. The Convention organs operate on the basis of subsidiarity and cases are only admissible when the applicants have exhausted domestic legal remedy (recourse to the national legal system to enforce one's rights).
Greece was a founding member of the Council of Europe, and in 1953 the Hellenic Parliament unanimously ratified both the ECHR and its first protocol. Greece did not allow individuals who alleged that their rights had been violated by the Greek government to make applications to the Commission, so the only way to hold the country accountable for violations was if another state party to the ECHR brought a case on their behalf. Greece was not a party of the Court, which can issue legally binding judgements, so if the Commission found evidence of a violation, it was up to the Committee of Ministers to resolve the case. Although the Council of Europe has considerable investigatory abilities, it has hardly any power of sanction; its highest sanction is expulsion from the organization. In 1956, Greece filed the first interstate application with the Commission, Greece v. United Kingdom, alleging human rights violations in British Cyprus. 21 April 1967 coup
On 21 April 1967, right-wing army officers staged a military coup shortly before the 1967 Greek legislative election was scheduled to occur. Alleging the coup was necessary to save Greece from Communist subversion, the new Greek junta governed the country as a military dictatorship. Its first edict was to issue Royal Decree no. 280, which cancelled several articles in the 1952 Constitution of Greece because of an indefinite official emergency. More than six thousand regime opponents were arrested immediately and imprisoned; purges, martial law, and censorship also targeted the ruling junta's opponents. The following months saw public demonstrations outside Greece opposing the junta. The suggestion of referring Greece to the European Commission of Human Rights was first raised in Politiken, a Danish newspaper, a week after the coup.
The junta became a target of vociferous criticism in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for its human rights violations. On 24 April, the Parliamentary Assembly debated the Greek issue. The Greek representatives were not present at this meeting because the junta dissolved the Greek parliament and canceled their credentials. On 26 April, the Assembly passed Directive 256, inquiring into the fate of the missing Greek deputies, calling for the restoration of parliamentary, constitutional democracy, and objecting to "all measures contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights". Although both the assembly and the Committee of Ministers showed a reluctance to alienate Greece, ignoring the coup entirely would have put the Council of Europe's legitimacy at stake.
On 3 May 1967, the junta sent a letter to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, announcing Greece was in a state of emergency, which justified human rights violations under Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This implicit acknowledgement that the junta did not respect human rights was later seized upon by the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark as the grounds for their complaint to the Commission. Greece did not provide any reason for this derogation until 19 September, when it asserted that the political situation before the coup justified emergency measures. The Commission considered this to be an undue delay.
On 22–24 May, the Legal Committee met and proposed another resolution against the junta. The Standing Committee of the Assembly adopted this as Resolution 346 on 23 June. The resolution stated Greece had violated Article 3 of the Statute of the Council of Europe: "Every member ... must accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms." The resolution expressed "the wish that the Governments of the Contracting Parties to the European Convention on Human Rights refer the Greek case, either separately or jointly, to the European Commission of Human Rights in accordance with Article 24 of the Convention". On 10 September, the Parliamentary Assembly debated documents prepared by the Legal Committee which stated that, although only the Commission could make a legally binding determination, the Greek derogation of the Convention was not justified.
Admissibility First application Under Resolution 346, on 20 September 1967, three member-states of the Council of Europe (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) filed identical applications against Greece before the Commission. They alleged violations of almost all the articles in the ECHR which protect individual rights: 5 (right to liberty and security of person), 6 (right to a fair trial), 8 (right to private and family life), 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion), 10 (freedom of expression), 11 (freedom of peaceful assembly and association), 13 (right to a legal remedy), and 14 (non-discrimination in securing the rights under the Convention, including on the basis of political belief). The applicants also stated Greece had not shown its invocation of Article 15 (derogations) to be valid. The applications, based on public decrees which prima facie (at first glance) violated the ECHR, referred to previous discussions in the Parliamentary Assembly in which the Greek junta was criticized. The next day, Belgian politician Fernand Dehousse proposed that the European Community bring a similar case against Greece, with which the EC had an association agreement. Although his proposal did not receive support, the EC cut off all economic aid to Greece. On 27 September, the Netherlands joined the suit with an identical application; the Commission merged all four applications on 2 October.
The Scandinavian countries did not have an ethnic affinity to the victims of human rights violations, nor did they have a commercial interest in the case; they intervened because they felt it was their moral duty and because public opinion in their countries was opposed to the actions of the Greek junta. Max Sørensen, the president of the Commission, said that the case was "the first time that the machinery of the Convention ... had been set rolling by states with no national interest in lodging an application and apparently motivated by the desire to preserve our European heritage of freedom unharmed". Although the case was unprecedented in that it was brought without national self-interest, international promotion of human rights was characteristic of Scandinavian foreign policy at the time. Following attempts to boycott goods from the applicant countries in Greece, exporter industries pressured their governments to drop the case. For this reason, the Netherlands withdrew from active participation in the case.
Belgium, Luxembourg and Iceland later announced that they supported the actions of the Scandinavian and Dutch governments, although this declaration had no legal effect. Attempts to elicit a similar declaration from the United Kingdom were unsuccessful, despite the opposition of many British people to the junta. The Wilson government stated that it "did not believe it would be helpful in present circumstances to arraign Greece under the Human Rights Convention".
The Greeks claimed the case was inadmissible because the junta was a revolutionary government and "the original objects of the revolution could not be subject to the control of the Commission". It argued that governments had a margin of appreciation (latitude of governments to implement the Convention as they see fit) to enact exceptional measures in a public emergency. The Commission found the emergency principle was not applicable because it was intended for governments which operated within a democratic and constitutional framework, and furthermore the junta created the "emergency" itself. Therefore, it declared the case admissible on 24 January 1968—allowing it to proceed to a full investigation.
Second application