ECHR to hand down ruling in case "Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia" on July 9
This was reported by the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, Ukrinform saw.
The Grand Chamber of the ECHR will announce the ruling at the ECHR premises in Strasbourg at 11:00 local time. A recording of the announcement will be available on the ECHR website following the hearing.
"The expected decision will be of fundamental importance – both for the international legal qualification of the Russian Federation's actions and for the protection of the rights of victims of Russian aggression, as well as for further trials to ensure the Russian Federation's accountability for international crimes committed in Ukraine," the ministry noted.
The "Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia" is the largest interstate case, uniting four applications at once. It covers the period from 2014 to the present and concerns crimes committed in the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The case also includes complaints about the actions of the Russian Federation throughout the full-scale invasion unleashed on February 24, 2022.
A separate part of the proceedings is the application of the Netherlands regarding the shooting down of the Malaysian Boeing, which killed all 298 people on board. Given the scale of the violations, 26 states and one non-governmental organization joined the case, marking unprecedented international support throughout the court’s history.
Oral hearings were held in Strasbourg on June 12, 2024, during which Ukraine presented its position on both the events since 2014 and Russia's war crimes since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The court's interim decision has already established that the Russian Federation was responsible.
On January 25, 2023, the ECHR, in its decision on the admissibility of the part of the case concerning the events in eastern Ukraine, had already concluded that from May 11, 2014, and at least until January 26, 2022, the territories of Donbas occupied by Russian forces were under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.
The court recognized that Russian military personnel had been present on the territory of Ukraine since April 2014, and documented the large-scale deployment of the Russian army since at least August 2014. Thus, the ECHR effectively refuted Moscow's claims about the "absence of troops" in Ukraine.
The ECHR also found that the shooting down of flight MH17 occurred in territory that was under the effective control of the Russian occupying administrations, and therefore the events fall under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.
As reported, the case “Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia” concerns massive and systematic human rights violations in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions; the abduction and attempted illegal removal of orphans from Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the territory of the Russian Federation in 2014; and the shooting down of flight MH17.
In 2020, three interstate cases were merged into one.
The Dutch Government participates in part regarding the case of the MH17 downing.
Ukraine filed a broader statement on the events in eastern Ukraine.
