Ukraine has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights against Russia with the accusation of carrying out “targeted assassination operations against alleged opponents”, the ECtHR said in a statement.
According to the appeal, filed on Friday (19/2), the murders were committed “in Russia and the territory of other countries, including members of the Council of Europe, except in a state of armed conflict”, the Strasbourg Court clarified.
“This transnational appeal”, a process in which one state sues another in the ECtHR, is the ninth that Kyiv has filed against Moscow, four of which are being examined by the Council of Europe, of which Ukraine and Russia are members.
The Ukrainian government also accuses Russia of “failing to investigate these assassination attempts” and of “organizing covert operations to obstruct efforts to identify those responsible,” the court said, without elaborating.
Kyiv, therefore, invokes a violation of the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights on the “right to life”.
The other transnational actions filed by Kyiv against Moscow, which are under consideration, relate to “the events that took place in eastern Ukraine, including the crash of Malaysian Airways Flight MH17, which was shot down in July 2014”, “many violations of the Treaty” in Crimea as well as a “naval incident that took place in the Kerch Strait in 2018 and led to the arrest of three Ukrainian navy vessels and their crews”.
Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in March 2014 was followed a month later by a war with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine that has killed nearly 13,000 people.
