Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect

  • Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect, edited by Mälksoo and Benedek, focuses on a pressing issue in the field of human rights law: the impact of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in decaying democratic contexts and authoritarian settings and the reception of the Convention and its standards by domestic judges in such environments. The book is timely due to two recent developments that set Russia aside from the other forty-six member states of the Council of Europe. First, there is a significant political standoff between the Russian Federation and the Council of Europe, evidenced in the suspension of voting rights for Russian national parliamentarians sitting in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.1 Since then Russia has stopped paying its contribution to the ordinary budget, bringing the Council of Europe into serious financial difficulty. Second, in December 2015, an amendment to the Federal Constitutional Law of the Russian Federation granted the Russian Constitutional Court the power to declare opinions from international human rights bodies “impossible to execute.”2 In this way, Russia has become the first Council of Europe member state to have a domestic constitutional process designed to resist the implementation of individual judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The book is comprised of twelve chapters and an introduction. Part I one of the book examines the relationship between Russia and the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe over time. Part II addresses the legislative and judicial reception of the Convention standards in Russia. Part III has three case studies exploring Russia’s response to judgments concerning gross human rights violation cases in Chechnya, right-to-property cases, and cases concerning the rights of LGBTI individuals. The final part of the book focusses on identifying the range of factors that explain the impact and reception of the European Court of Human Rights in Russia, although every chapter in the book also does this, offering its own account of and explanation for impact and reception. Overall, the book argues that the effects of the European Court of Human Rights in Russia have been selective and limited, but that the impact and reception have variations not only across issue areas but also across time. Roter, exploring the periodization of the variation of the Strasbourg Effect in Russia, identifies three key phases (Chapter 1). The first period between the accession of Russia to the European Convention on Human Rights until the mid-2000s is identified as comparatively good times where both domestic and international actors had meaningful hopes that the influence of the Strasbourg Court would bring about domestic reforms in Russia. The period from the mid-2000s until the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 is characterized as a period in which there was a massive influx of cases against Russia and slow compliance but continuing participation in the Council of Europe machinery, like any other state. From 2014 onward a new period began, which is characterized as one of open resistance to Strasbourg in Russia, albeit with a degree of à la carte compliance, in particular with respect to the payment of compensation to victims of human rights violations, which have continued in this period. According to this periodization, Strasbourg’s Russia problem really started in 2014, a time when Russia could no longer be understood as just another country with a large number of pending cases and a compliance problem. The issue-specific investigations of the Strasbourg Effect further support the claim that the reception and impact of the European Court of Human Rights vary across groups of cases. While the Chechen cases (Leach, Chapter 8), which identify gross human rights violations by security forces, have been some of the hardest cases in terms of lack of implementation of the judgments, the Russian judiciary and legislature have been more responsive, using Strasbourg decisions finding a violation of the right to property (Starzhenetskiy, Chapter 9) to reform parts of the property regime of the Russian Federation. With respect to the protection of LGBT rights (Bartenev, Chapter 10), the book underlines that these cases did not face open resistance from apex courts early on, but that that the LGBT cases in the current post-2014 context do have the potential to deepen the open resistance of Russian authorities to the European Court of Human Rights

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Metadaten
Document Type:Review
Language:English
Author(s):Başak Çalı
Parent Title (English):International Journal of Constitutional Law
Publication year:2019
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:361
Last Page:365
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/moz014
Release Date:2019/05/17
Volume:17
Issue:1
Hertie School Research:Centre for Fundamental Rights
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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