The ECHR will no longer consider complaints from Russians. Exceptions will be made only for cases in which Russia is a party to an armed conflict

The ECHR will no longer consider complaints from Russians. Exceptions will be made only for those cases that involve armed conflicts with Russia’s participation

Today, the European Court of Human Rights issued a decision in the case of Tatyana Lebedeva v. Russia and 878 other applications: in it, the court removed from its list of pending complaints those applications from Russians that had been filed before Russia’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe, the “Team Against Torture” writes.

An exception will be made only for those complaints connected to armed conflicts involving Russia. This means the court will not issue individual merits judgments on the rejected complaints, the human rights defenders clarified.

After Russia ceased participating in the system of the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR continued to consider cases concerning violations that occurred before September 16, 2022. Since September 2022, it has delivered judgments in about 14,500 individual applications against Russia. Russia refused to pay the compensation awarded by the court, and as of today the debt has exceeded 315 million euros.

Now, however, the court has concluded that the remaining complaints do not fall under any of the categories that had still been considered within the court’s residual jurisdiction.

For Russians, the ECHR had always been the last hope for justice, and today that ghostly hope has finally collapsed. Faced with rights violations and the impossibility of restoring them at the national level, Russians believed that in the end an independent international court would consider their case, issue an objective ruling, and restore justice. But today, with its unprecedented decision, the court denied access to international justice to more than a thousand people, thereby failing to follow the principle of human rights and acting in a discriminatory manner. We consider it unfair that people who spent years seeking consideration of their complaints and had already turned to an international protection mechanism ultimately did not receive an individual assessment of their claims,

comment the human rights defenders from the “Team Against Torture”.

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