As it follows from the HUDOC data of the European Court of Human Rights, on October 20, the Court published the communications in some groups of cases against Russia connected with the ban of Crimean Tatar self-governing institutions by the aggressor since 2016.
Those cases are “Khersonskyy Regionalnyy Medzhlis Krymskikh Tatar against Russia, no. 24196/17 and 5 others,” “Ali Asan Ozenbash and Zair Sitbelyalovich Smedlyayev, nos. 24258/17 and 27710/17 against Russia”, “Bekir Ablayevych Mamutov against Russia, no. 23993/17 and 2 others,” “Eskender Enverovych Bariyev and Ryza Fevziyovych Shevkiyev, nos. 4513/17 and 27071/25 against Russia” and others.
As it follows from the communications, the applicants complain that the order for the aggressor’s dissolution of the Mejlis and the ban on its activity also encompasses the members of the Mejlis, local Mejlises etc., and therefore constitutes an interference with the applicants’ freedom of association, the prevention from communicating freely with other representatives of the Crimean Tatar self-governance system and Crimean Tatars.
Applicants stressed that the real purpose of the above-indicated ban was to silence and to punish the Crimean Tatar self-governing bodies for their political opposition, that the “supreme court of Crimea” was not “established by law” in light of the occupation of Crimea, and that the designation of the Mejlis as an alleged “extremist organization” retroactively criminalized legitimate activities of Crimean Tatars.
The applicants complained that no distinction was made between the specific status of the Mejlis as a representative body of the indigenous peoples, and other public associations of Crimean Tatars, and that they had no effective remedy in the Russia-occupied Crimea.
Thus, applicants stress Russia’s violations of articles 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, and 18 of the European Convention against them. The deadline for Russian comments for those communications is established as January 2026, but the aggressor obviously will not give the positions in those cases; at the same time, the Court offered the Ukrainian Government to participate in those cases as a third party and give its own position.
As ARC’s expert Borys Babin stressed on those issues, the specificity of these cases is that the violations do not arise from the aggressor’s attempts to terminate the operation of some “political organization of the Crimean Tatars”, but rather from the oppression by the occupiers of the entire representative system of the indigenous people of Ukraine in principle, which is a component of the Kremlin’s genocidal practices and the racist policy of Moscow imperialism.
The most dramatic, in Professor Babin’s opinion, were the cases of the local Mejlises of the Kherson region, which in 2017 wrote to the European Court precisely about the risks of the future aggression of Russia on mainland Ukraine and further predicted oppression there by the occupiers of the Crimean Tatars, which happened from 2022.
Borys Babin added that this summer, the European Court asked about the situation with these mejlis, and thanks to the efforts of the ARC and the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, information, in particular from the occupied territory, about the aggressor’s further repressions was collected, verified, and provided to Strasbourg.
The system of national self-government of the Crimean Tatars is not about individual people, but about institutions that, in particular thanks to the processes described in Strasbourg, should be preserved until the de-occupation of Crimea, ARC’s expert summarized.
