The Inter-State case procedure to the European Court of Human Rights has been used only a dozen of times between 1956 and 2008. In 2009, Georgia used it against Russia and Ukraine currently has four such cases pending against Russia. Moscow, for its part, has only used it once since its accession (1996), that was in July of 2021 against Kyiv.
In the Georgian case, the Court held that Russia should pay Georgia €10 million for non-pecuniary damage, to be distributed among the victims, or at least 1,500 Georgian nationals.
As for Ukraine, in addition to obtaining yesterday the activation of Article 39 of the European Convention on Human Rights allowing the Court to order Russia to cease any military operation endangering civilians, it also received in January a declaration of partial admissibility for its Inter-State case concerning the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the “numerous human rights violations” that took place there between February 2014 and August 2015.
A Grand Chamber hearing was also held on 26 January in the Ukraine/Netherlands v. Russia case concerning the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014 in the Donetsk region.
Pending as well are a case concerning the naval incident in the Kerch Strait in 2018 and another, submitted in February 2021, regarding “targeted assassination operations against perceived opponents of the Russian Federation, in Russia and on the territory of other European States” (including Alexei Navalny, Sergei Skripal and Anna Politkovskaya).
In July 2021, Russia, for its part, lodged an application accusing Kyiv of having - repeatedly and in more ways than one - violated the European Convention on Human Rights since the overthrow of power in 2014 and the arrival at the helm of “pro-European leaders”. It also holds Ukraine responsible for the crash of flight MH17 for failing to close its airspace.
Alongside these cases, 7,000 individual applications relating to the 2014 events in Crimea and the hostilities in eastern Ukraine remain pending before the Court.
None have been tried at this stage and this will not be the case soon, as the war makes it impossible to take into account the rulings. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)