The Greek junta announced its withdrawal from the Council of Europe after the junta was found guilty of torture and other human-rights violations by the European Commission of Human Rights.

The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels was a right-wing military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew the caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou's Centre Union was favoured to win.

Greece was not one of the ten founding members of the Council of Europe, but it was the first state to join, doing so three months later, on 9 August 1949. In 1953, the Hellenic Parliament unanimously ratified the Council of Europe's human rights treaty, the European Convention on Human Rights, and its first protocol. Greece filed the first interstate case before the European Commission of Human Rights, Greece v. United Kingdom, in 1956, alleging human rights violations in British Cyprus.

In September 1967, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands brought the Greek case to the European Commission of Human Rights, alleging violations of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by the Greek junta, which had taken power earlier that year. In 1969, the Commission found serious violations, including torture; the junta reacted by withdrawing from the Council of Europe. The case received significant press coverage and was "one of the most famous cases in the Convention's history", according to legal scholar Ed Bates.

The European Commission of Human Rights was a special body of the Council of Europe. From 1954 to the 1998 entry into force of Protocol 11 to the European Convention on Human Rights, individuals did not have direct access to the European Court of Human Rights; they had to apply to the commission, which if it found the case to be well-founded would launch a case in the Court on the individual's behalf. Protocol 11 which came into force in 1998 abolished the commission, enlarged the Court, and allowed individuals to take cases directly to it.