Having caused much controversy by ruling that prisoners should not be denied the right to vote, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has received some bad press of late.

Full Fact recently took the Daily Express to task over some of the claims it made about the ECtHR in its ‘Get Britain out of the EU’ supplement. Today the Daily Mail reserved some choice criticisms for the Court in its article on the impending debate on prisoner voting.

According to the Mail: “A damning report by the former English Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf savaged the quality of the judges at the Strasbourg court.”

Sensitive to the highly-charged nature of the debate, we thought a closer inspection of Lord Woolf’s report – ‘Review of the Working Methods of the European Court of Human Rights’ – might be a worthwhile exercise.

Sure enough, rather than ‘savaging’ the quality of the judges, Lord Woolf’s report actually states that: “The lawyers and judges of the Court are all extremely committed, and are constantly looking to innovate and improve, and try out new working methods. It is, in my view, to their credit that the Court continues to function in the face of its enormous and often overwhelming workload.”

So what should we make of the Mail’s reading of the rest of the report?

The Daily Mail says: “Lord Woolf found that some judges understand neither English nor French, the two languages in which the court conducts its business, and that as a result they do not ‘contribute’ to its rulings.”

The report says: “Judges arrive from all over Europe, and some have better language skills than others. As deliberation in Chamber is in either French or English, judges with insufficient knowledge of these languages – or who have a passive, rather than active, knowledge of French and English – may be unable to contribute fully to deliberations, and thus to the final judgment. I believe that the Court should provide language training, where necessary, for new judges.”

The Daily Mail says: “It also accused Euro-judges of going absent from their duties without leave and of failing to understand the basic legal principles on which the court is supposed to work.”

The report says: “Judges are very frequently invited to attend seminars and conferences and, while the value of such participation is recognised, it seems sensible, given that the Court is under so much pressure, to introduce a more transparent system whereby leave is planned and agreed in advance.”

The Daily Mail says: “Lord Woolf added that the huge delays in hearing cases at Strasbourg have thrown the court into ‘crisis’ and mean that it is breaking its own human rights rules.”

The report says: “The Court has made tremendous efforts to improve efficiency, but simply cannot keep abreast of this ever-increasing caseload.

“The Court must be given a lifeline if it is not to be drowned by its own success. It would be tragic if an institution which has played such a critical role in promoting and protecting human rights in each Member State were not rescued.”

[It is worth noting here that the report does not warn that the ECtHR is “breaking its own human rights rules”, but argues that the court may have enlarged upon it earlier human rights remit, to the extent that “of the admissible applications, only a fraction raise serious human rights questions.”]

Is this a question of journalistic license of flat misrepresentation? Whereas some of the Mail’s criticisms do draw upon areas identified for improvement by Lord Woolf, the notion that the report ‘savages’ the quality of the work done at the ECHR requires some creative reading, not least because Lord Woolf is often at pains to stress the opposite.