On Thursday 6 April, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which is responsible for supervising the execution of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, published its annual report for 2022, a year marked by the return of war to Europe with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as the first sentence of the document indicates.
Excluded from the Council of Europe as of March 2022, Russia is nevertheless bound by its commitments entered into upon ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights until September 2022, and the Committee of Ministers is obliged to verify the execution of the Court’s judgments in all cases concerning events occurring before that date.
To achieve this, against the absolute non-collaboration of Moscow, the Committee of Ministers had to put in place “innovative strategies”, confirmed Clare Ovey, Head of the Department for the Execution of Judgments of the Council of Europe, at a press conference on 5 March.
Contacts and meetings with Russian civil society, human rights NGOs and other international bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee were increased during the examination of 25 Russian cases or groups of cases including inter-state cases Georgia v. Russia, human rights violations in Transnistria and in the Caucasus, others related to domestic or police violence or the case of Alexei Navalny, an opponent of Vladimir Putin who is still in prison despite the Court’s demand for his release.
In total, at the end of December 2022, there were 2,352 cases pending in the Russian Federation (38% of the total figure) compared to 1,942 in 2021.
According to Clare Ovey, the Committee of Ministers’ determination to pursue these cases is based on the “importance” of affirming that, whatever the circumstances, a state remains bound by the obligations it undertook when it ratified the Convention.
It is also about expressing “solidarity with Russian civil society and the applicants” by taking decisions that can be “useful” later, she continued, before concluding that “the message is about the values of the Council of Europe”.
The report also notes the quality of the cooperation with Ukraine “in extremely difficult circumstances”.
Reacting to the publication of the report, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Marija Pejčinović Burić, underlined the importance of compliance with the Court's decisions with regard to the rule of law and the fact that “the Court is now dealing with more and more cases of increasing complexity”.
She confirmed that the execution of judgments should be an “important theme” of the Council of Europe Summit of Heads of State and Government to be held in Reykjavik on 16-17 May, calling for “political will”.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/68s (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)