On April 14, the European Court of Human Rights published lists of questions to the aggressor regarding at least two groups of cases related to the occupied Crimea.
One list concerns the aggressor’s forced “adoption” of ten Crimean children with Ukrainian citizenship who were in orphanages on the peninsula as of 2014.
As the ARC expert Borys Babin noted, this case 6719/23 will in fact be a precedent for all several thousand Crimean orphans and it will play a certain role in international processes regarding mainland Ukrainian children “adopted” after 2022. The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union is leading this process.
The second list of issues (applications 45623/15, 53716/16, 41775/17, 72692/17 and others) concerns a group of cases on the forced granting of “citizenship” by the aggressor in Crimea since 2014, the transfer of persons from the occupied peninsula to the mainland, their loss of property and discrimination by the aggressor against those applicants who are Crimean Tatars.
These cases, Professor Babin pointed out, will be of exceptional importance in the further international dimension of “Russian citizenship” and “Russian passports” for Crimean residents, in proving the guilt of Russia in the internal transfer of Crimean inhabitants to the mainland and in confirming the discriminatory policy of the occupiers towards the Crimean Tatars.
“I am conducting four cases from this group as a lawyer, and there will still be several bonus “Easter eggs” there, which I hope the Court will tell about in the decision,” the human rights activist added.
Another case from the same group, under application 1025/23, where journalists Nataliya Kokorina and Sergiy Mokrushyn are among the other victims, is being conducted by English lawyer Jessica Gavron, barrister and co-chair of the Manchester-based European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, EHRAC.
In this regard, Professor Babin recalled that it was Gavron who represented Susanna Bezazieva in the European Court, who two months ago became the first Crimean Tatar woman in history whose repressions by the occupiers were considered on the merits by Strasbourg, satisfying her claim in the case “Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia”.
As the expert added, the Court’s decision on both described groups of Crimean cases should be expected no earlier than the end of 2025, and it is likely that the decisions in cases of torture and murder on the occupied peninsula, communicated by the European Court over the past year, will be approved before then.
