The Importance of General Measures in the Process of Executing Decisions of International Courts

The enforcement of international courts’ judgments, being a special issue of modern international law, raises a number of related questions before the legal doctrine and practice. One of these questions concerns possible measures to be adopted for the purpose of implementation of an international judgment. International courts, by the way of evolutive interpretation of their powers following from international treaties, enlarge the practice of recommending the adoption of general measures by Respondent States with a view of preventing repetitive violations of international rules in the future. The combination of general and individual measures is seen as the optimum for the efficient implementation of international judgments, and the international courts’ powers to recommend the adoption of general measures may be described as an important tool of performing the international courts’ role in global governance. The article focuses on the evolution of general measures in the practice of international courts, primarily on human rights protection, but equally provides for an overview of other international courts’ and tribunals’ experience in this area. General measures are analysed in the context of the subsidiarity principle and its correlation with expanding powers of international institutions to issue recommendations on how to implement their judgments, as well as with the general assumption of the binding nature of international judgments. Special accent is made on the evolution of general measures concept in the case‑law of the European Court of Human Rights, because of its special role in the development of this legal tool. The application of general measures in the case‑law of the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights is given attention as well.