The European Court has ruled that the decisions of the occupation courts regarding land in Crimea are invalid

<span><span><span><span><span><span>The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has confirmed that Russia has no right to apply its laws in the occupied territory. Therefore, all decisions by the occupation courts, on the basis of which people’s land was seized, are illegal.</span></span></span></span></span></span>

<span><span><span><span><span><span>This was reported by the Office of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. </span></span></span></span></span></span>

<span><span><span><span><span><span>The ECHR’s ruling was issued in the case of “Bazhenov and Others v. Russia and Ukraine.” During its consideration of the case, the court also referred to materials from the official Crimean Platform website, which confirm the scale of illegal property expropriation on the peninsula. In particular, the court noted that between 2014 and 2017, at least 3,800 land plots were confiscated in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. One of the grounds for this was the occupying administration’s review of decisions by Ukrainian state authorities regarding the transfer of land plots into private ownership, in particular under the pretext of infrastructure construction. </span></span></span></span></span></span>The court regarded the Russian authorities’ claims regarding alleged violations of Ukrainian law during the pre-occupation allocation of land as merely a formal pretext for revoking property rights under Russian law.

<span><span><span><span><span><span>The ruling will serve as a benchmark for protecting the property rights of Ukrainian citizens and establishing an international compensation mechanism.</span></span></span></span></span></span>

Earlier, it was reported that the European Court of Human Rights had scheduled oral hearings in the case of ten Ukrainian children whom Russia effectively abducted following the occupation of Crimea in 2014. Human rights advocates call this an exceptional procedural development, as such hearings are scheduled outside the Grand Chamber only in rare cases.

Юлія Калабайда