A local girl with a dog reacted in Dec. 2024 at the site of a missile strike in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine. On Wednesday, the France-based International Court on Human Rights handed down two rulings against Russia, saying since 2014 it violated international law in Ukraine as source of “widespread” and “flagrant” cases of human-rights abuses stemming from Russia’s full-scale Ukrainian invasion in February 2022. File Photo By Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
The European Court of Human Rights delivered Wednesday two of four rulings against Russia in an international inquiry brought by Ukraine and the Netherlands.
Judges at the France-based court handed down two rulings against the Russian state, saying since 2014 it violated international law in Ukraine as source of “widespread” and “flagrant” cases of human-rights abuses stemming from Russia’s full-scale Ukrainian invasion in February 2022.
“In none of the conflicts previously before (the Court had) here been such near universal condemnation of the ‘flagrant’ disregard by the respondent State for the foundations of the international legal order established after the Second World War,” the court wrote in its judgment.
In addition, the Strasbourg court said Russia was the culprit in the 2014 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in a tragedy that claimed nearly 300 lives, many of whom were Dutch citizens.
Notably, it was the first time that an international court ruled on Moscow’s role for downing the Boeing 777 on top of human rights violations in Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The legal actions were filed prior to the European Court of Human Rights expelling Russia in 2022 following the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine.
A Dutch court in January 2023 said its native Netherlands could bring its case over the doomed aircraft in front of the ECHR.
The two remaining cases filed by Ukraine still getting weighed address the kidnapping of Ukrainian kids to Russia, and other war-related violations in the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine.
In May, the UN’s Aviation Council officially said Russia was the principal for the MH17 crash that was on its way to Kuala Lumpur via Amsterdam.
Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 other cases against Russia are pending in front of the international tribunal in France filed by separate entities.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky formally approved plans last month to create a new international court in order to later prosecute senior Russian authorities for the now years-long Ukrainian invasion, with no end yet in sight.
On Wednesday, Europe’s human rights court pointed to “repeated” human rights violations by Russia over a more than eight-year window.
It included “indiscriminate” attacks by Russian military units, executions, allegations of torture, intimidation, unlawful and arbitrary detentions and persecution of journalists and religious groups.
It follows a similar 2021 ruling by the human rights court that said Russia likewise committed violations during its 2008 war in neighboring Georgia after a cease-fire in the “buffer zone.”
The court also pointed in its ruling on Wednesday to “rape as a weapon of war,” acts of looting, private property destruction and “the organized removal of children to Russia and their adoption there.”
