The European Social Charter (ESC) is not just a ‘declaration of rights’ or a catalogue of rights that states declare to uphold or which they attempt to promote. It also provides for a specific monitoring mechanism intended to secure compliance with the obligations entered into by the states parties. This mechanism, which is embedded in the institutional framework of the Council of Europe, is based mainly on the role played by the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) and is largely built around two separate supervisory procedures.

One is a typical ‘reporting procedure’, according to which states parties regularly submit a report on the implementation of the Charter in their legislation and practice. These reports are examined by the ECSR, which assesses whether the national situations are in conformity with the Charter.

The other is what is known as the ‘collective complaints procedure’, which enables social partners and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to apply to the ECSR directly for it to rule on possible violations of the Charter in the country concerned.

As has already been mentioned, this procedure applies today only to the 16 European states which are parties to the 1995 Additional Protocol and may only relate to the compliance by these states with the provisions of the Revised or 1961 Charter which each of them has accepted.

As is clear from the Explanatory Report to the 1995 Protocol, the main aim of setting up the collective complaints procedure was to increase the efficiency, speed and impact of the monitoring of implementation of the Charter. In this view, it equipped the ESC system with a quasi-judicial supervisory mechanism, aligning it as closely as possible with the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the Charter is regarded as a counterpart in the area of social and economic rights. The procedure was also intended to ‘increase participation by management and labour and non-governmental organisations. The way in which the machinery as a whole functions can only be enhanced by the greater interest that these bodies may be expected to show in the Charter’.