The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled on the case of Tatyana Lebedeva against Russia and 878 other applications, removing them from its list of cases under consideration. The court found that these complaints do not fall within the categories examined under its residual jurisdiction.
In its ruling, the court said the rejected complaints may be "potentially justified," but they do not concern issues "of substantial importance for determining Russia's responsibility." The court also noted there was no longer a need to examine the remaining individual applications, as they concerned issues that had already been sufficiently studied, and significant judicial resources for their continuation could not be justified.
Since September 2022, the ECHR has issued rulings on approximately 14,500 complaints against Russia, but the country has refused to pay the compensation awarded. According to calculations by the Committee Against Torture, the debt from unenforced rulings exceeds 315 million euros.
Maxim Olenichev, a lawyer with the First Department legal aid group, called the court's decision a serious mistake — both legal and reputational. He noted that among the rejected complaints are cases raising important issues, such as the complaint of Lev Shlosberg, who was stripped of his parliamentary mandate in 2015, as well as cases about the refusal to grant access to FSB archives on political repression and about an unjustified ban on entering Russia.
The Committee Against Torture called the decision unprecedented and discriminatory. Human rights activists noted that some applicants had been waiting for their cases to be heard since 2007, and now for them "the faint hope for justice has finally collapsed."
The court reserved the right to restore any of the dismissed cases if it considers that "circumstances justify such a decision." According to Olenichev, this is only possible if Russia returns to the Council of Europe, but no one knows whether that will happen.