On 16 July, the European Court of Human Rights published Judgment in the case “Bazhenov and Others v. Russia and Ukraine” that concerned the “cancellation” by the Russian “authorities” of the applicants’ titles to plots of land in Sevastopol, which had originally been transferred into private ownership by the Ukrainian authorities before 2014.
Applicants were Volodymyr Bazhenov (case 20092/18), Yelena Melnik (case 30408/18), Sklyarenko Svitlana (case 42807/18), Oleksandr Bornyakov (cases 28518/19, 28521/19, 28525/19, 28528/19, 28530/19, 28532/19, and 28535/19) and Anatoliy Agafonov (case 27314/19).
They relied on Article 6 § 1 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, and they further complained in substance of a violation of Article 13 of the Convention, regarding violation of their rights to property and justice. Applicants were presented by the Ukrainian lawyers Yegor Boychenko, Andriy Leshchenko, and Sergiy Zayets.
Part of the applicants complained that the Ukrainian Government had not fulfilled their positive obligations under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, as they had failed to preserve the land allocation documentation in the Crimean archives or to protect their property by diplomatic, economic, judicial, or other means. But in their submissions to the ECtHR done in 2023, they stated that they had decided to waive all claims against Ukraine.
In the Judgment, the ECtHR has found that “a systematic campaign of large-scale expropriation and nationalization of civilian and private enterprise property in Crimea, based on a package of the local de facto authorities’ resolutions/laws and the Russian Federation’s laws, did not have a legal basis”. It was not justified by “imperative military necessity” or “for the needs of the army of occupation.” As such, it constituted the administrative practice of expropriation without compensation, in violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1.
In the Judgment, the ECtHR added that the disputed “decisions” of the Russian “courts” in Crimea were not in accordance with the law within the meaning of the Convention. “This conclusion renders it unnecessary to consider whether the decisions complied with the other requirements or to address the parties’ other arguments”, the ECtHR added.
Lastly, given its findings that the “tribunals” were not established by law, the ECtHR considered that “it is not necessary to examine the complaints about specific procedural deficiencies, such as the assessment of evidence or limitation”.
Also, “involving a large number of imponderables and given the impossibility of quantifying the applicants’ losses in exact terms having mainly regard to the continuous nature of the violation of their rights”, the ECtHR found “it appropriate to award an aggregate sum for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage”, from 30 to 3 thousand euros to various applicants.
It is interesting to add that the ECtHR referred in that Judgment, inter alia, to the material published in August 2021 by the Crimea Platform, “a diplomatic consultation and coordination format initiated by the Ukrainian Government”, about the illegal expropriation of property of Ukraine and its citizens in Crimea. This Judgment seems to be the pilot for the next ECtHR decisions on claims about property rights in the Russia-occupied Crimea.
