Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights prescribes that individual applications must be directed against one of the Convention States. Consequently private actors involved in proceedings against other private actors before domestic courts must complain about State inaction in their application to the European Court of Human Rights. In other words originally horizontal conflicts must be verticalised in order to be admissible. Although such verticalised cases make up a large portion of the Courts case law the particular nature of these cases as well as procedural issues that may arise in them has not received much attention. To fill this gap this book offers a detailed examination of verticalised cases coming before the Court. The characteristics of and the Courts approach to verticalised cases are explored by means of an indepth analysis of four types of verticalised cases cases related to ones surroundings cases involving a conflict between the right to reputation and private life and the right to freedom of expression family life cases and employeremployee cases. On the basis of this analysis it is argued that the Courts current approach to verticalised cases poses problems for private actors Convention States and the Court itself. In presenting recommendations for the resolution of these problems the book concludes with a proposal for a new approach to verticalised cases consisting of a redesigned thirdparty intervention procedure.