Properly framing the European Committee of Social Rights’ (ECSR’s) decisions on the merits within the essentially jurisdictional context of the collective complaint procedure allows to understand their legal importance over and above the assessment of the specific case that is the object of a single collective complaint, namely, their importance from the more general perspective of identifying and interpreting the content of the obligations imposed on states by the European Social Charter (ESC).

It is of course correct to say that states parties to the 1995 Protocol, and thus also their domestic courts and tribunals and other state authorities and organs, are not legally bound to apply the ESC in accordance with the specific interpretation of the Charter's provisions given by the ECSR in its assessments under the collective complaints procedure.

Nevertheless, the exclusive competence to monitor the implementation of the Charter from a legal standpoint, granted to the ECSR by the parties to the Charter system; the fact that the collective complaints procedure makes it possible to put the abstract normative prescriptions of the Social Charter to the test of specific and concrete situations; the judicial approach by which the Committee exercises its supervisory role under this procedure; the level of legal precision of its decisions on the merits; and the fact that, as already noted, the states concerned are actually committed to give a follow-up to such decisions, all help to give the ECSR's decisions an absolutely crucial interpretative value.

More precisely, decisions on the merits, even though they lack the formally binding effect of res interpretata, can still serve to clarify, explain and supplement the content and implications of states’ obligations as laid down in the Charter.

In other words, states parties to the Charter, including ones that are also party to the 1995 Protocol, are not legally bound to comply with the ECSR's interpretation of Charter provisions in its decisions on the merits of collective complaints when they – that is to say, their organs, including national judges and courts – are required to make domestic judicial rulings on Charter provisions, and they are not prevented from applying such provisions and rights on the basis of an alternative meaning or interpretation to that established in the ECSR's case law.