Europe’s human rights court drops 879 Russian complaints. Lawyers call the unprecedented decision a sign of institutional crisis.

In early September, the European Court of Human Rights said it would not examine 879 complaints from Russians filed between September 2007 and September 2024. In its July 7 decision, the court cited its authority to strike cases from its list when continuing to examine them would be “no longer justified.” Because its resources are limited, the court said it wanted to focus on cases of “greatest significance.” The Council of Europe expelled Russia on March 16, 2022. Russia remains obligated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights’ earlier rulings, but it refused to do so after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Among the complaints the court struck from its list are three cases involving Alexey Navalny, a complaint over the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses and their designation as “extremists” in Russia, a case concerning torture in Chechnya, and hundreds of others. Meduza asked three Russian lawyers whose clients were affected by the court’s decision what it will mean for people left without protection against the Russian state — and for the law more broadly.

Vadim Prokhorov

Represented Gennady Gudkov in a case the European Court of Human Rights struck from its list. Filed in 2013, the complaint challenged the decision to strip Gudkov of his seat in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

The European Court of Human Rights’ decision isn’t exactly surprising — we knew some kind of ruling was coming, but we couldn’t have predicted exactly what would happen.

Under Article 37(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, the court can strike a case from its list if the circumstances allow for one of three conclusions:

• first, subparagraph (a) — the applicant no longer intends to pursue the complaint;
• second, subparagraph (b) — the dispute has been resolved;
• third, subparagraph (c) — for any other reason established by the court, further examination of the complaint is no longer justified.

The court combined 879 complaints and struck them from its list under Article 37(1) (c) — a cleverly worded provision open to broadly different interpretations.

The court said that the complaints had not been found unfounded or inadmissible. But given the exceptional circumstances, it concluded that continuing to examine them was no longer justified.

That exceptional situation is clearly linked to Russia’s departure from the Council of Europe and from the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction. Among the reasons the court gives is the unprecedented situation created when Russian authorities refused to comply with its rulings.

But Russia is still obligated to comply with the court’s rulings and cooperate with it on complaints filed while Russia remained under its jurisdiction, from May 1998 to September 2022. Amid the war of aggression Russia unleashed and what amounts to a fascist Putinist regime, Russia is ignoring that obligation, just as it ignores other norms of international law.

The court also cites another important — perhaps the key — justification: the need to use its limited judicial resources efficiently. It says it has already reviewed a substantial body of Russian cases in recent years and established its positions on the main categories of Convention violations by Russian authorities.

As I understand it, the court’s position is this: since Russia is no longer under its jurisdiction and doesn’t comply with its rulings or cooperate with it, the proceedings have lost their relevance. I disagree for several reasons.

The point of the European Court of Human Rights isn’t to shower aggrieved parties with money — compensation is usually very small. Its job is to show a Council of Europe member state where it has misapplied the law or where the legislation itself falls short of the Council of Europe’s high but entirely fair standards.

That’s how it worked during Russia’s early years in the Council of Europe: at least in the early 2000s, Russia did take steps in response to the court’s foundational rulings. The early Putin regime wanted to mimic a European state and tried to behave decently.

The first such case to be heard publicly, for example, was Kalashnikov v. Russia, handled by Karinna Moskalenko. The argument was that conditions in Russian pretrial detention facilities, and in the Russian prison system as a whole, amounted to torture.

But by the later Putin years, Russia had stopped heeding the court’s recommendations and demands — nothing remained except the payment of compensation.

Even though Putin wouldn’t have complied with the court’s rulings anyway, the court’s legal position itself matters enormously. These 879 cases concern a great many [affected] people and their families. Sooner or later, the European Court of Human Rights will have to return to them, and it would be better to hear them now. This is both a moral issue and a legal one.

Crime exists to some degree in every country, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fought. The same goes for international bodies: if political regimes ignore their rulings, the authority of international legal institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights, needs to be defended and strengthened — with enough funding to ensure that cases don’t take decades to resolve. The European community needs to look in the mirror and find the courage and means to address its own shortcomings.

There’s also a purely practical side. I’m absolutely convinced that, over time, a mechanism will be developed that would allow compensation to be paid, for example, from frozen Russian assets not only to Ukraine — which is, of course, very important — but also to Russians who have suffered under the Putin regime.

There’s no reason to play along with tyrants and dictators. At some point, Russia will start talking about normalization, lifting sanctions, and returning to the European family. When that happens, one of the first questions should be whether it complies with the European Convention [on Human Rights] and enforces the court’s rulings.

It’s clear that the court’s decision hasn’t ruled out that possibility, but [putting off a decision] isn’t the best way to solve the problem.

Maxim Olenichev

Handled six complaints the European Court of Human Rights struck from its list; one was filed in 2016.

The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly said that its staff is overloaded with cases — Russia ranked among the top three countries for violations of the human rights guaranteed by the Convention. Cases involving threats to life or other irreversible consequences are, of course, given priority; the rest come afterward. Everything depends on the court’s staff; applicants have no clear timetable. Many people filed complaints and simply waited.

I had hoped the court would rule on cases it had already registered. Of course, once the full-scale invasion began in 2022 and the Council of Europe expelled Russia, the court faced a difficult problem: Russia had been forcibly removed from its jurisdiction, but what do you do with a massive backlog of complaints when Russia ranks among the top three countries for the number of complaints?

The court tried to group the cases by the most sensitive issues — the persecution of politicians and civil society activists, and the designation of people or organizations as “foreign agents” and of organizations as “undesirable” or “extremist.” It reviewed those categories of cases.

That left 879 complaints that didn’t fit any category. The court concluded that each would have to be reviewed individually and, to save resources, struck them from the list instead.

I didn’t expect the court to issue reasoned rulings on them the way it did before 2022. I thought it might issue declaratory rulings, as it has done recently. Those rulings run no more than 15 paragraphs: the court finds a violation of a specific right and may also award monetary compensation.

But I didn’t expect all the complaints to be struck out. After all, the court was conceived as a model for protecting the weaker party — the citizen — from the state.

This decision shows that the court’s system is in crisis. The court says it wasn’t prepared for such an influx of complaints. In my view, issuing short rulings on the complaints it struck out wouldn’t have required many resources. If the court returns to these cases in the future, a ruling may no longer help restore the applicants’ rights — some may have died, and for others a ruling may no longer be relevant. [A European Court of Human Rights ruling can serve as grounds for a humanitarian visa or asylum.]

The court could have found violations, awarded compensation, and not turned people away.

First, its rulings matter as documentation of human rights violations. Second, applicants can present a finding that their rights were violated as documentary evidence in applications for refugee status or humanitarian visas.

Third, when the court issues a ruling and awards compensation, Russia’s obligations don’t disappear. If Russia doesn’t pay, interest accrues — and in 20 years, that hypothetical 5,000 euros will have grown into a much larger sum.

There have always been questions about the court’s effectiveness. The speed with which it reviews cases is one measure of that effectiveness. Next year, the statistics will look better because unresolved Russian cases had been dragging down the numbers.

When a state — in this case, Russia — isn’t a member of the Council of Europe, it doesn’t pay dues to support the organization’s bodies, including the European Court of Human Rights. If these cases had remained unresolved, resources would still have gone into processing them, including nonfinancial resources such as staff time. Other member states could ask why the court’s resources were being spent on Russian cases. I think that’s the main reason.

Anonymous

A lawyer working in Russia who handled one complaint the European Court of Human Rights struck from its list.

This is unprecedented, and it was completely unexpected. I think the court chose to protect its own reputation. It sees the trend and understands that Russia won’t enforce its rulings — they’ll simply vanish into a void. Why expend effort on these cases when, by the court’s own reckoning, its rulings change nothing?

[The decision to exclude from this list] cases involving armed conflicts in which Russia is involved fits the same logic. After all, if the reasoning is that Russia doesn’t comply with rulings against it, and that alone justifies not spending resources on them, the same [logic would apply] to those complaints. But refusing to review those complaints altogether would simply be improper — it would look bad.

I don’t think hearing the complaints [struck from the list] would have cost the court much. Given how long the process takes, it has the ability to redistribute those resources.

I tend to think that if the court’s rulings have been useful for anything lately, it’s [perhaps only] to strengthen political asylum cases. That’s the only thing that will now get harder. But I’ve never seen these rulings play a decisive role in obtaining asylum. They were used alongside other factors, simply to add weight. In practice, these rulings really don’t matter, and the court is right about that.

I understand that [rulings on complaints to the European Court of Human Rights] have no prospect of making a difference, but I believe that if you’re going to sink, you should at least keep the flag raised. Here, both happened: the ship sank, and the flag came down too, when the court refused even to declare that human rights had been violated. Practically speaking, this changes nothing. But for the people who have kept filing complaints with the European Court of Human Rights, this is above all an ethical matter.

Now their only option is to turn to the U.N. Human Rights Committee. For some, the three-year filing deadline has already passed — all they can do now is explain that the European Court of Human Rights dragged the case out for years and ultimately never reviewed it. I think applicants could be allowed to file after the deadline.

For me, as a lawyer, this is also a professional matter. When you’re in Russia trying to make your case and getting rejected at every level, you inevitably start to wonder whether you’re the one who doesn’t understand something about life or the law. But when the European Court of Human Rights agrees with you, you know, as a professional, that if people over there agree with you too, you haven’t lost your mind after all.

From these two purely moral and ethical perspectives, I find it deeply disappointing that the court has abandoned the whole matter.