Europe’s Human Rights Watchdog is celebrating its 15th anniversary, but we are not really in a festive mood after the Russian Federation had to be expelled from the Council of Europe a few weeks ago: the photos of the Russian flag in front of the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg being taken down are too surreal and depressing.
However, the events of the past weeks also showed us that common values such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law are important to the European states. This view was apparently shared by the visitors of Europe’s Human Rights Watchdog, as the access statistics of the platform for the past 12 months show:
Visitors
More than 30,000 people have accessed over 120,000 articles. Most of the hits on contributions in German came from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Contributions in English were mainly accessed from the UK, the US, France, Italy and China. 55% of visitors were male, 45% female. 78% of all visitors were younger than 45 years.
Top 5 articles
The top 5 of the most read articles were: the European Court of Human Rights; the European Convention on Human Rights; the Council of Europe; the core values of the Council of Europe, and the Quiz. Regarding the latter, even though the questions are the same, participants in the English version did almost twice as well as those in the German version.
Cyberattacks
In addition to the automated cyberattacks, Europe’s Human Rights Watchdog was subjected to more than 100 individual hacking attempts per day. By far the largest number of these came from Turkey, followed by Russia and the US.
Requests
Europe’s Human Rights Watchdog received more than 120 requests from readers during the last 12 months. 90% of them came from men. In the years since our 10th anniversary, the approach has become so aggressive that we had to introduce a contact form and point out that only politely worded enquiries are answered. 1 person in 25 said thank you for the information we provided.
Even if the celebrations are a bit subdued due to the circumstances, we will continue our commitment to Europe’s Human Rights Watchdog and to you, our readers. We hope you find our information useful and look forward to your comment or guestbook entry.
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