(CN) — The European Court of Human Rights tossed out a case against Ukraine on Tuesday, citing Russia’s failure to pursue the discrimination complaint it launched two years ago.
Moscow brought the suit in 2021, accusing Kyiv of killing and abducting Russian nationals living in Ukraine, barring them from voting, restricting the use of the Russian language, and causing the deaths of the 298 people who died on passenger jet Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Since last year, however, the country has not replied to communication from the Strasbourg-based court about the case.
“In the light of … the Russian Government’s repeated failure to reply to the Court’s correspondence and to inform it whether they intend to pursue the application, the Court considers that the Russian Government should be regarded as no longer wishing to pursue their application,” the seven-judge panel wrote Tuesday.
Because the judges have also found little evidence for Russia’s allegations, they concluded that no grounds exist for the examination to continue.
The rights court is overseen by the Council of Europe. Although that body expelled Russia from its ranks upon the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the court's procedures allowed Russia’s complaint to continue even after its removal.
In April 2022, the Kremlin supplied the court with a hard drive containing some 2,000 pages of evidence it claimed showed the ongoing human rights violations committed by Ukraine.
When the court asked for more information a month later, however, Russia did not respond. In other cases, too, the country has failed to acknowledge communication from the court. Russia also shunned a November 2022 letter from the rights court that asked if it wanted to continue with the proceedings.
Under the court’s rules, judges can dismiss a case if the applicant “fails to pursue the application.”
The court noted that a number of the claims made by Russia face review in other cases, including the four cases Ukraine has brought against its neighbor. Those suits stem from both the ongoing war as well as the conflict that started in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.
Earlier this year, the court accepted three cases alleging Moscow has been committing human rights violations in eastern Ukraine since 2014, including the downing of flight MH17. In that case, judges found there was “clear evidence” that the Kremlin supplied weapons and fighters to separatists in the region and held sway over their political and military strategy. An international investigation team looking into the case said in February 2023 there were “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off personally on the transport of the weapon used to bring down the passenger jet.
The ECHR was the first international court to make a ruling about the full-scale invasion, ordering Russia to stop the hostilities on March 1, 2022, only one day after Ukraine made the request — a call that has gone unheeded.
It has pending an additional 8,500 individual applications stemming from the nearly decade-old conflict, brought both against Russia and Ukraine.
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