On September 24, an expert of our Association, Professor Borys Babin, at the invitation of the organizers from the Center for Civil Liberties, took part in the round table held in Kyiv “Compensation or Illusion: Which Mechanisms Work and Which Don’t?”
During the event, a presentation of a study of the legal analysis of the situation with lawsuits by citizens against Russia in national courts regarding compensation for damage caused by aggressor as a result of the war, as well as an expert discussion of currently available compensation mechanisms and their effectiveness, took place. This event was a continuation of the discussion started in the summer, which was then supported by the “Renaissance” International Foundation as part of the “Human Rights and Justice” program.
Representatives of authorized ministries, the public sector and the Kyiv Office of the International Register of Losses took part in the discussion, who expressed their own positions regarding the growing number of court decisions on the recovery of funds from the aggressor state in national courts.
In a conversation with the participants of the event, Professor Babin noted, that the reason for the increase in the number of such decisions, some of which relate to events in the occupied Crimea, and which sometimes really have flaws in the wording, in the justification of the amount of damage and give rise to questions of further implementation, is the natural demand of citizens and business for justice under the conditions when the respective interests of the victims, the interests of the state of Ukraine, and the interests of the global order are not identical.
Regarding considerations about ways of correcting the relevant judicial practice, Professor Babin reminded that the judicial power of Ukraine, as an independent branch, is of particular importance for the preservation of people’s power in the current conditions; the expert emphasized the need to use precisely and exclusively the legally prescribed forms of response of the executive power to the relevant processes.
Such legal forms should be the approval by the specialized ministry of methodological recommendations on the calculation of moral damage caused by aggression and international crimes, which has not yet happened in Ukraine, and the active involvement of the specialized ministry as a third party in relevant civil cases, which would allow for the formation of an effective practice of appeals and the Supreme the court in a legal way, and not due to pressure on justice.
Babin reminded that Russia, in the person of the foreign minister there, recently declared the non-recognition of jurisdictional immunities of Ukraine during the fake “blockade case” in the “supreme court of the Republic of Crimea” on the occupied peninsula.
Despite the falsity of that “process”, this very declared position of the aggressor must be taken into account according to the principle of reciprocity, since now Russia cannot invoke its own “immunities” in national court cases where the plaintiffs are Ukrainian legal entities and individuals.
At the same time, the expert pointed out, that the Association is working on mechanisms for recovery of reasonable moral damages from individuals, who proactively act in the aggressor’s interests in the occupied territories, including Crimea.
The expert gave an example of the recently initiated case 521/11949/24 on the recovery of moral damage caused by the Crimean collaborators, namely Vladimir Konstantinov, Yefim Fiks and Serhiy Trofimov, due to their accusation of specific persons in alleged “ecocide” and “terrorism” as part of the fabrications, described by them repeatedly in our Association of “Crimean blockade cases”.
