Russia—Champion of Complaints to the European Court

For several years now, Russia has held the leading position in terms of the number of appeals to the European Court of Human Rights.
As Anatoly Kovler, the judge representing Russia in Strasbourg, said on Thursday, there are currently 20,300 complaints from Russia in the court’s proceedings. Another 1,500 are at the review stage. More than half of all appeals concern the violation of people’s rights to a fair trial.
In total, over the last 10 years, 46,685 cases against Russia have been filed in Strasbourg, which accounts for about a quarter of all appeals to this authority. Last year alone, the European Court recovered more than 2 million euros from our state in favour of citizens.
Incidentally, on Thursday, the court satisfied the claim of seven Russian prisoners serving sentences in a colony in the Perm region. Each of them was awarded 10,000 euros in compensation. In Strasbourg, it was recognised that the rights of the convicts were seriously violated during a 2001 special forces operation, during which they brutally beat these people for several days. In Russia, the investigation into this fact was terminated because they could not ‘identify the faces’ of the security officers (all special forces members were wearing masks), and the commander of the special unit was acquitted.
Experts say such an influx of Russian complaints to Europe is connected with the fact that ‘our justice system is not coping with its task.’ ‘Most Russian judges consider themselves links in a chain of prosecution that starts with a beat police officer, followed by an investigator and a prosecutor, and the last one is the judge. That is why they so rarely hand down acquittals,’ explained Yuri Kostanov, Chairman of the Presidium of the Moscow Bar Association, to ‘NI’. Moreover, according to the lawyer, the ‘mechanism for correcting judicial errors’ does not work in Russia today, and when a person appeals to a higher court to challenge an unfair verdict, they receive a ‘mocking response—all the arguments of your complaint were considered by the court of the lower instance.’ ‘But, for heaven’s sake, that is exactly what is being complained about!’ concluded Yuri Kostanov.