Introductory Note

In 2015 the Strasbourg Court decided many cases of legal significance. The most important were given by the Court’s Grand Chamber of the Court, which issued a total of nineteen judgments on the merits during the year. The article lists all the Grand Chamber judgments published in 2015 and mentions the relevant subject matters. The following four cases established important points of European human rights law. 1) Lambert v. France had already attained a very high media profile when it was filed with the Court in mid-2014, concerning the right to life and the end of life. 2) Perinçek v. Switzerland brought before the Court a difficult question about the limits of freedom of expression, concerning in particular freedom of expression and the denial of genocide. 3) Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, and Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan concerned the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Grand Chamber decided to hear these cases in parallel considering in particular: (i) the extraterritorial jurisdiction—Armenian jurisdiction over Azen territory and (ii) the presumption of jurisdiction over the entire national territory.