Dates, money, legal costs: decisions of the European Court for “Raping” cases

The ECHR published his annual report, where he said that in 2019 44,500 cases were received in the court. Of these, 15037 cases - from Russia, that is, a little more than a third of the court’s work is occupied by cases from our country.

“In 2019, an increase in the number of complaints from Russians really recorded,” comments on the ECHRA report by the lawyer of the Memorial human rights center Marina Agaltsova. - The ECHR has a concept - “system problems”. And these systemic problems, unfortunately, are not solved at the national level. Therefore, people have to contact [the European Court]. The systems can also be considered a systematic problem when people who are not agreed with the city authorities suddenly begin to arrest for peaceful demonstrations. The authorities do not solve this problem, so the number of complaints has increased.

The second reason for such an amount, according to a lawyer, is that the ECHR is becoming more and more known among citizens, so people are more willing to file complaints. Also, knowledge about such a defense tool penetrates the colony and prison.

“Now there are still complaints about the conditions of detention, they come in large quantities, the state is very poorly solved by this problem,” says Marina Ahaltsova. - It moves towards this, constantly reports to the Committee of Ministers that it is trying to solve this problem, billions are allocated, but for most these problems remain unresolved, so people continue to send a large number of complaints there.

ECHR and freedom of assembly

As in Russia there is 31 article of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to a peaceful protest, and in the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms there is an 11 article that also postulates this right. Citizens have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, to conduct meetings, rallies and pickets. Even if this is not agreed with the local authorities.

Often this right is violated by the authorities, rallies are dispersed, participants are subjected to administrative or even criminal prosecution. Complaints of violations of the 11th article of the Convention are sent to the ECHR, where the court makes a decision whether the state has violated this article or not.

Over 21 years of the ECHR, 147 decisions were made against Russia on violation of the right to freedom of assembly. Among them are cases, for example, in the “swamp business”, the case of Navalny against Russia and other cases of detention on protests. As part of the campaign for filing complaints from the ECHR, the lawyers of the OTD-Info and the Human Rights Center "Memorial" plan to send at least a thousand complaints indicating the violation of the 11th article of the Convention.

ECHR and big money

In their decisions, the ECHR obliges the countries to pay compensation to citizens whose rights were violated. According to the report of the Public Verdict Foundation, for 20 years of the court, from 1998 to 2018, Russia paid about 2 billion euros. In 2019, another 600 million were added.

According to violations of the 11th article of the Convention, the largest compensations were paid in the Lashmankin case and others against Russia. 30 applicants participated in the case. The ECHR made a decision to award them compensation in 160,450 euros. The applicants tried to agree on their protests, but they were refused this - in violation of Russian law. We wrote in more detail in the text about pilot decisions.