Another 706 registered applications have already been accepted and are awaiting a hearing date.Italy heads the table, though, with 8,273 pending cases followed by France with 7,767 and Poland with 5,816.The backlog of five years applies to all countries. However the court has just seven lawyers to deal with the UK cases. It is understood they are not just overstretched but in danger of being swamped by the outstanding case load.Sadiq Khan, a London lawyer with law firm Christian Fisher said he has several cases which have taken five years to reach a determination by the court. "I have one case when the petition was lodged last year and we still haven't heard anything."All these cases involve people, sometimes in desperate circumstances, who have already spent many years exhausting their domestic remedies in the UK courts.While the EHCR can give priority to cases in which life is at risk, those cases involving the loss of a home or job must remain in the queue.Last year the court introduced a new system to accommodate the backlog.

A permanent court was established, replacing the original two-tier system. But last week the court president Luzius Wildhader admitted the problem was still daunting.In the first five and a half months of this year the restructured court in has opened 10,217 provisional case files - already two-thirds of last year's total of 16,353. Mr Wildhader appealed for a "firm political commitment" by governments of member states to ensure the convention was "respected at national level" to ease the pressure on the court.Wait For JudgmentROBBIE POWELL died in a Swansea hospital nine years ago, aged 10, suffering from Addison's disease, which is rare but treatable. His parents, Diane and Will (right), took legal action, believing doctors had covered up their failure to identify his condition in time.In 1997, the Appeal Court ruled doctors had no legal duty to tell the truth to the family of a child who dies under their care.

Mr Powell has been diagnosed with post-traumatic shock, which he says is caused by refusal to tell the truth, leaving him unable to work. In October he wrote to the ECHR claiming a breach of his human rights. Even if the case is accepted, the Powells may have to wait five more years for judgment. Mr Powell says: "Half a million pounds has been spent on the legal battle and we still don't know the truth I suppose I will just have to be patient.". PRIVATE CONTRACTORS will be paid pounds 1.4m under a three-year deal to take over key education services in a failing London borough.

Confidential Hackney Council documents show Nord Anglia Education Services also stands to gain a pounds 325,000 performance bonus if it meets targets at the end of the deal, the first in British state education. But the firm will face penalties of up to pounds 217,000 if its performance is poor. Hackney councillors approved details of the contract last week. The Cheshire-based company, run by Britain's first education multi-millionaire, Kevin McNeany, will run the borough's school improvement and ethnic minority education services from 1 July. The authority had to contract out the two services after a damning report by school inspectors earlier this year.The Department for Education will pay pounds 224,000 towards the first year's costs. The rest of the contract payments will be met by the borough's council taxpayers.Liberal Democrats on the council said council tax rates would have to rise to pay for the private contractors. Philip Pearson, the local-education spokesman, accused the Government of making no more than a token payment.But a spokesman for the Department for Education said Hackney was spending below government guidelines on improving schools and the extra payments were needed "This is the price of failure. It's absolutely right that more resources should be diverted to school improvement." Last week the Government published figures on local authority spending to "name and shame" councils that failed to spend enough on education.Mr McNeany declined to discuss the value of the Hackney contract and "did not recognise" the council's figures.

He said the company would be providing extra services and insisted the council would get value for money.. IT MAY sound like a joke from a Carry On film, but a new device could change the future of female security: the alarmed brassiere. Techno Bra is the inspiration of Kursty Groves, a designer, and offers more tangible support than underwires. It contains electric circuits that monitor the wearer's heartbeat and trip an alarm if it leaps suddenly, indicating panic. Unless the wearer responds and switches off the alarm, which vibrates silently, a central computer is alerted and the whereabouts of the bra can be pinpointed with a global positioning system.The brassiere is still being developed but has awoken commercial interest.