You're reading: Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Italy leading in number of applications to European Court

Brussels - The European Court of Human Rights has released the statistics for 2012: a total number of applications from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Italy combined account for 55% of all the cases received by the court. 

The relevant data were announced in Strasbourg on Thursday at a press conference of ECHR President Dean Spielmann.

The court received a total of 10,446 complaints from Ukraine.

According to the ECHR, the number of pending applications, which had topped 160,000 in September 2011 and stood at 151,600 on January 1 2012, had been reduced to 128,000 by the end of the year.

For the first time since the establishment of the new Court in 1998, the number of cases pending before it at the end of the year is lower than that of the previous year (128,100, a decrease of 16% in comparison to 2011).

In 2012 the court passed a total of 1,093 judgments.