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(CN) — Russia must pay Georgia over 250 million euros (about $288 million) for years of suffering endured by civilians trapped along the tense borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Europe’s human rights court ruled Tuesday, delivering one of the biggest compensation orders in the tribunal’s history.
The story begins with the 2008 war, when Russian troops swept into neighboring Georgia after Tbilisi moved to reclaim South Ossetia, a breakaway region controlled by Moscow-backed separatists since the early 1990s.
The fighting lasted only five days but redrew borders that are still in dispute. Moscow recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent, built military bases and helped local forces erect fences and checkpoints.
Over time, those barriers became the centerpiece of what Georgia calls “borderization,” a slow process that has separated families and cut villages off from their farmland, separating families and blocking people from their livelihoods.
Ethnic Georgians crossing to pick up pensions or medicine were often stopped, fined or beaten and sometimes shot. Many of the victims named in the court’s ruling are elderly villagers who lost both their homes and their livelihoods once those fences went up.
Georgia first brought the case in 2018 after years of arrests and disappearances near the fences. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible for violence, unlawful detentions and shutting down Georgian-language schools in occupied areas, breaching basic rights to life, liberty, family and education.
Tuesday’s judgment reaffirmed those findings and set the damages, with the court saying the violations weren’t isolated but part of a broader pattern it called “administrative.” The judges said Russia not only allowed the abuses to continue but also failed to investigate them, showing a clear disregard for its human rights obligations.
The court ordered Russia to pay Georgia more than 252 million euros (about $292 million) in damages, money that will go to thousands of people caught up in the years of border turmoil.
The biggest share, 224.25 million euros, covers at least 23,000 ethnic Georgians who have been unable to return to their homes and farmland in Abkhazia and South Ossetia since the war. Another 20 million euros was set aside for more than 4,000 schoolchildren shut out of Georgian-language classrooms after local authorities switched instruction to Russian by 2023.
The court also ordered 5.17 million euros for 2,586 people unlawfully detained, 1.97 million euros for 76 victims of ill-treatment, 1.3 million euros for 20 civilians killed or shot while trying to cross the boundary and 320,000 euros for 64 others whose daily movement was restricted by Russian or local forces.
The judges made clear the payout was meant to reach those who actually suffered, not the Georgian state, saying it has “not been sought to compensate the state for a violation of its rights, but rather for the benefit of individual victims.”
The court also made clear that when Russia quit the Council of Europe, it didn’t erase the nation’s record. Because the abuses happened before its 2022 departure, the judges said they still had full authority to rule on compensation.
The judges tasked Georgia with handing out the compensation under the supervision of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, which still monitors Russian cases after Moscow’s exit.
Under Article 41 of the European Convention, Russia now has three months to pay or face extra interest tied to the European Central Bank’s lending rate plus three percentage points. But with Moscow refusing to enforce European court rulings since its 2022 withdrawal, the chances of payment are slim.
The conflict has also drawn the eye of international prosecutors. The International Criminal Court opened a war crimes investigation in 2016 and, in 2022, issued arrest warrants for three senior officials from the Russian-backed South Ossetian administration. None have been detained, and the case remains unresolved.
Officials from both the Georgian government and the Russian authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
The ruling will become final unless Russia asks the court’s Grand Chamber to review it, something that rarely happens.
Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.
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