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.
