On September 3, the European Court of Human Rights adopted a decision that is unprecedented in the history of international justice as a whole: it struck out 879 remaining applications for cases against Russia, whose applicants included more than 1,500 people and organisations in total.

In its decision in the case of Lebedeva and Others v. Russia, the Court announced that it would continue to examine only interstate and individual applications against Russia connected with the armed conflicts in Ukraine and Georgia. Everything else has been thrown in the bin. Among the applicants in these cases are residents of the Dagestani village of Vremenny, whose homes were destroyed during a 2014 counter-terrorism operation; victims of bombings during the Second Chechen War; relatives of those killed on the Kolskaya drilling platform in 2011; a man who was abducted and tortured several years ago by Kadyrovtsy; relatives of journalist and human rights defender Timur Kuashev, who was killed by Russian security services in 2014; and relatives of the Syrian El-Ismail, who was tortured and killed by Wagner PMC mercenaries in 2017. Many of them had waited decades for a decision from the Court. Today, their wait came to an end: they have been left alone with the Russian state.

On March 16, 2022, shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe.

Russian authorities immediately ceased all cooperation with Strasbourg. They stopped responding to requests from the ECHR, presenting their position in court cases and corresponding on the implementation of the Court’s judgments. The Court received its last official letter from Russia on March 28, 2022, in which the authorities stated their intention not to implement its judgments from March 16, 2022 onward. In June 2022, that refusal was enshrined in law: Vladimir Putin signed legislation prohibiting the implementation in Russia of ECHR judgments that entered into force after March 15, 2022.

It is known that even then, voices inside the ECHR started calling for the Court to stop examining any applications against Russia. At first, the Court did not support this position and confirmed in March 2022 that it would continue examining Russian cases concerning all facts that occurred before Sept. 16, 2022, the date on which the European Convention on Human Rights ceased to apply........

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