Reflections

On September 3, 2026, the European Court of Human Rights struck out 879 separate applications against Russia, brought by at least 1,534 applicants, in a single document. In six of those applications, the Court had already found a violation and struck out only the question of compensation. In the other 873, it decided nothing at all. Nine of the 879 are applications in which I represented the applicants. 

In August I wrote on Reflections, in “Presumed Consent, Absent Notice,” that September 3 was worth marking on the calendar, and promised to come back and explain what the Court had found in the cases I had spent thirteen years litigating. There is nothing to explain. 

We did not lose. Losing would have required a judgment. 

What the Court decided 

The decision is called Lebedeva and Others v. Russia. Seven judges of the Third Section agreed to it unanimously. Not one wrote separately. 

The decision does not cover everything. Cases arising from Russia’s armed conflicts, and the inter-State cases, sit outside it and are still being processed. What was closed on September 3 was the remainder—879 different applications. 

It begins by clearing away every simple explanation for dismissing the cases. The Court has jurisdiction over these cases, because everything complained of happened before Russia left the Convention system. None of them is inadmissible. The complaints are, in the Court’s own words, “potentially meritorious.” 

So, the Court did not close these cases because they were bad. It closed them because it decided they were no longer worth deciding. Article 37 § 1 (c) of the Convention allows the Court to close cases where “it is no longer justified to continue the examination of the application.” 

Four reasons are given. 

The main work is done. Since Russia left the Convention, the Court has delivered judgments in some 14,500 Russian applications, including the most serious ones—Navalnyy, Nemtsova, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the foreign-agent laws, and torture in Chechnya. That is a real achievement in hard conditions, and I do not question it. 

These 879 leftover cases raise no issue “of marked importance” for Russia’s responsibility or for the development of the Court’s case law, and they are too complicated for the fast procedure used for routine repeat cases. 

Deciding them would cost too much. The judges’ time would come at the expense of cases against the forty-six countries still in the system. 

Russia has stopped taking part. It refuses to appear and refuses to file observations. The Court says this makes the exercise worthless—a point it calls “not decisive” but weighs anyway. 

The decision adds that it is not final. Under Article 37 § 2, the Court may put an application back on its list if it considers that the circumstances justify doing so. I will come back to this at the end. 

Put like that, the decision is hard to argue with. The first of those reasons I accept. The other three depend on something the Court did not publish. 

What the Court did not publish 

Attached to the decision is a table of 879 rows. Each row gives an application number, a case name, a date, the applicants’ names, and, where they had one, their lawyer’s name. That is all. 

The table describes nothing. It does not say what any case was about, what stage it had reached, or what any of these people claimed had been done to them. 

This omission matters because Court’s remaining reasons—importance, cost, and Russia’s absence—turn on exactly those missing facts. Whether a case had been argued. What it was about. Whether the law it raised was settled or open.  

Some of it can be pieced together, but not by a reader of the decision. For cases that had been sent to the Russian Government, the Court publishes a “statement of facts,” which includes its own summary of the case and the questions it intends to put to the parties. For example, the statement of facts in Sablina and Others v. Russia, one of the nine I represented, runs to several pages and is on the Court’s public database. What is never published is what Russia said in reply or what the applicant then said to that reply. For the cases never sent to the Government, there is no information available at all. 

Sezeminy v. Russia is one of the cases in the table. It is an organ-removal case brought under the same statute as Sablina—I know this because I helped the family bring it. You would never learn what the subject matter is from the published record. The row only gives the name of the case, the applicants, a number, and a date.   

There is one more thing about that table. When this Court strikes cases out of its list, it normally says what they were about. For example, in Sobol and Others v. Russia, a 2010 decision striking out thirty-six applications under the very provision used here, the Court set out the facts and the complaints in two short paragraphs before disposing of them. Thirty-six similar cases can be described in a paragraph; 879 different ones cannot—which is precisely why a column was needed, and why the Court, having already written a statement of facts for each communicated case, had the material to fill one. I have not found a prior strike-out decision that neither describes the cases in the text nor provides the equivalent in an appendix column. But Lebedeva does neither. Instead, it names the themes in the abstract—fair trial, property, expression, conditions of detention, immigration, data protection—and never connects a single theme to a single case. I do not know why it is missing, but I know what its absence does: 879 cases were closed, and the public record of what they concerned is only a list of names. 

Four parties hold the complete files: the applicants, their lawyers, the Court, and the Russian Government. The first two are the only ones both able and willing to describe them. 

I can describe nine of the dismissed cases. In seven of the nine, the Court put the case to the Russian Government for a response. The Government’s observations arrived on these dates: 

The last exchange closed five months before Russia’s final letter to the Court, which the decision itself dates to 28 March 2022. Russia was still answering the Court at the end of 2021. The remaining two cases were never sent to the Russian Government at all. 

So, the fourth reason, that Russia has stopped taking part, does not apply to these nine cases. Seven of them had already been fully argued by both sides. They were finished. They needed nothing from Russia. They needed a judgment. 

The Court knew the 879 cases were not alike in this respect. Paragraph 30 of the decision says so: “The applications in this group are at various stages of the proceedings. Some have been communicated to the respondent Government, while others have not.” Despite noting this difference, the decision never uses it. Instead, one reason, resting partly on Russia’s absence, is applied to every case—including the ones where Russia’s absence changed nothing. 

Nobody asked the applicants 

The decision to dismiss the cases was taken without the applicants and their lawyers being able to comment on or object to the striking out. They found out when the decision arrived. In Burmych and Others v. Ukraine, an example of the Court’s practice when dismissing cases, the Grand Chamber heard arguments before striking anything out. 

The contrast with the Court’s own practice is stark. In Sobol and Others, the Court struck out thirty-six applications only after inviting the applicants to reply to what was proposed, and its decision records what they said: some agreed, some did not answer, and a majority disagreed, most of them because they thought the compensation was too low. The Court answered those objections before it closed the cases. The setting differed—there, the respondent Government had offered compensation—but the question before the Court was the same one it faced here: whether respect for human rights required the examination to continue. In Sobol, the Court answered that question with the applicants’ objections in front of it. In Lebedeva, there was nothing to answer, because nothing was asked. 

This is the whole problem in one line. The Court’s reasons are claims about individual cases. Those claims can only be checked against the files, but the people holding the files were never asked. 

Had they been asked, we would have told the Court that seven of the nine cases I worked on were finished and waiting.  

What the test actually measures 

Take the second reason—that these cases raise nothing important enough. It has two halves: a case counts if deciding it would establish something new about Russia’s responsibility, or add something to the development of the Court’s case law more generally. Both halves ask what a judgment would be worth to the law. At least two of the nine cases show what this test leaves out. 

Korolevy v. Russia was sent to the Russian Government in 2017. The first applicant is serving a life sentence; the second is his wife, who has been convicted of nothing. The complaint was about the rule that barred life prisoners and their spouses from long family visits during their first ten years, and about what followed from it: the couple could not have a child, either naturally or by assisted reproduction. 

In November 2016, the Constitutional Court of Russia, relying on the European Court’s Grand Chamber judgment in Khoroshenko v. Russia, reversed two of its own earlier rulings, held the ban on long visits incompatible with the Constitution, directed the legislature to create a procedure for such visits, and ordered one visit a year until it did so. About assisted reproduction, it said nothing at all. 

That was the question the Korolevs had brought. In Dickson v. the United Kingdom, the European Court had already held that denying a prisoner access to artificial insemination can breach the Article 8 right to respect for private and family life. The principle was settled. What remained an open question was how that principle applied to a life prisoner and his wife in Russia, to the ten-year ban, and to the years already lost under it—a question about Russian law, not about the Convention. A judgment would have answered it and taught Strasbourg nothing. 

The organ-removal cases fail both halves at once. At least four of the 879 applications concern the same Russian statute—the law that presumes a dead person’s consent to the removal of their organs unless they or their relatives objected in advance. These involved four families, dealing with four hospitals, involved in applications lodged between 2014 and 2022: Sablina and Others, Valyushchenko, Mardar and Sezeminy. Whether one statute producing the same outcome again and again, in different cities, hospitals and different years, is an accident or a pattern is the classic question of State responsibility. Yet, the Court closed all four as raising nothing of marked importance for Russia’s responsibility. 

In Sablina and Others, we relied on two earlier Strasbourg judgments, Petrova v. Latvia and Elberte v. Latvia. The three other organ cases also rest on those same two precedents, which hold that removing organs from a dead person, under a law that presumes the family’s consent and gives them no real chance to object, breaches Article 8. In Elberte, the Court also found a violation of Article 3, the protection against inhuman or degrading treatment, for what the family was made to endure. The law had been settled for more than a decade. That is exactly why these cases failed the test. 

Read that again, because it is the heart of the matter. The Court did not say that the removal of a nineteen-year-old woman’s heart, both kidneys, adrenal glands, parts of her aorta and vena cava, and part of a lung—with only two organs recorded in the medical file by the surgeon, and no word to her parents—was unimportant. It said the case would establish nothing new about Russia’s responsibility and teach the Court nothing new. 

Both cases failed for the same reason: Strasbourg had already said what the law was. The test measures how useful a case is to the Court. It does not measure what was done to the person, and it does not measure what a judgment would have changed inside Russia. A case can be as serious as any the Court has ever decided and still fail—and the clearer the law already is, the more certainly it fails. Settled law becomes a reason not to apply it. 

Elena Sablina did not go to Strasbourg to develop the Court’s case law. Neither did the Korolevs. And neither, I expect, did anyone else on that list. They went because Article 34 of the Convention gave them the right to go, and because they had exhausted Russia’s domestic remedies. The right of individual application exists so that a person can defend their own rights—not so that they can supply the Court with material. The second reason judges them on the one thing none of them came for. 

Consider what the closing of Sablina’s case leaves. The Russian courts heard the family’s claim behind closed doors. They refused a journalist’s written request to attend—his own separate application is also on the list of 879, struck out the same day (Sivoldayev v. Russia). They read out only the operative parts of their judgments and never published them in full. The only document anywhere that sets out what happened to Alina Sablina is the statement of facts the European Court itself drafted in 2016. The Court wrote that summary, sent it to Moscow, received Russia’s answer, and then closed the case as not worth deciding. It will not now become a judgment. It establishes nothing. Between Russian courts that closed their doors and the European Court that closed the file, January 2014 has no judicial record at all. 

The delay that became the reason 

The third reason—that deciding these cases would cost too much—has a problem of its own, and it is the one I cannot get past. 

I say this knowing what the Court has been carrying. Russia was for years its largest source of cases—at the peak, roughly a quarter of a docket of more than 150,000. The Court has been a victim of how much people trusted it. On September 3, that trust was spent. 

The decision is named after the first case in the table. Lebedeva v. Russia was lodged in September 2007. It waited nineteen years and was never decided. The second case waited eighteen. The oldest of the nine I represented waited twelve and a half. Sablina waited more than ten. Korolevy sat ready for judgment for eight. The table has 879 rows but at least 1,534 applicants: one row, Karayeva and Others, involves 297 people. Counted per person, from the day each application was lodged to the day it was closed, the waiting recorded in that table comes to more than eleven thousand years. None of it produced a judgment. 

Deciding all of this at once would indeed be a heavy burden. But the burden exists because the cases were not decided. They were not decided because they sat for years, while the Court dealt with applications lodged long after them. The Court’s own delay created the pile. The pile then became the reason not to decide. 

No longer a court of individual application 

There is something in this third reason that should be said out loud. If deciding individual applications one by one is now too heavy a burden for this Court, then the Court has become something else entirely. A court that chooses which good cases are worth its time is not the court the member States built, and it is not the court that existed before September 3, 2026. Article 34 gives every person the right to bring their own case to this Court. That right means nothing if the Court decides which of those cases are worth deciding. 

The power the Court has just used is one the member States were repeatedly asked to give it and repeatedly declined. Through twenty years of reform—the Wise Persons’ Report, Interlaken, Izmir, Brighton, two Protocols—they never gave this Court the power to pick cases by importance. Every filter they added was a rule about admissibility, applied case by case. The Brighton Declaration calls the right of individual application “a cornerstone of the system.” Unlike the Supreme Court of the United States, or the Constitutional Court of Russia, the European Court does not choose which good claims it will hear. Until now. 

The people who wrote the Convention understood this right to be of the utmost importance. Among them were Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, and Pierre-Henri Teitgen, whom the Gestapo had arrested. They were not designing a court to refine doctrine. They were building an alarm bell—one that any single person could ring. 

A court that chooses which good cases are worth its time may be a defensible institution. But if that is what this Court now believes itself to be, it should say so plainly and put it to the States, so they can decide whether to change the Convention or build something else. Such a transformation should not arrive as a side effect of clearing a backlog. 

This was foreseen 

None of these objections is new. Seven judges of this Court made them nine years ago. 

Burmych and Others v. Ukraine, the decision this one is built on, was not unanimous. Judges Yudkivska, Sajó, Bianku, Karakaş, De Gaetano, Laffranque, and Motoc dissented together. They wrote that striking out cases this way “has nothing to do with the legal interpretation of human rights” and was instead “a decision of judicial policy.” They insisted that “the Convention requires each application to be given an individual judicial assessment and that no victim is to be regarded by the Court as ‘a burden.'” And they warned that this approach “has the perverse result of encouraging member States not to introduce general measures where a structural problem has been found to exist.” 

That warning was about States that stay in the system and drag their feet. Lebedeva applies the same method to a State that has walked out and announced it will not obey. This time, nobody dissented. 

The Court says it faces a situation with “no precedent in the history of the Convention system.” It is candid that its own precedents do not really fit: in Burmych, the cases at least went on to the Committee of Ministers, and in Turan and Others v. Turkey, the applicants had already won a finding. In both, they got something. Here, they get nothing. The reasoning was borrowed; the safeguards were not. 

What the applicants wanted 

Each of those 879 rows is a person, a family, and sometimes a company or a community. 

By 2026, almost none of them expected money. Russian law says judgments that took effect after 15 March 2022 will not be carried out, and everyone understood what that meant. What they still expected was a piece of paper: an independent international court, having heard both sides, setting down what happened to them and saying they were right.  

And that paper is not only a record. A judgment of this Court is an authoritative finding, by an independent international tribunal, that a person was persecuted and that the State was responsible for it. Findings of that kind carry weight in asylum and humanitarian protection proceedings, in Europe and in the United States, where the decisive question is often whether an applicant’s account can be corroborated from an independent source. Many of the people on this list have left Russia. For some of them, the judgment they were waiting for would have been the strongest evidence available to them in another country’s court. The decision measures what a judgment is now worth by whether Russia will pay for it. It was the only thing left. It is what was taken away on September 3, without anyone asking them what they thought about it. 

I have believed in this Court since I was a law student. I still think it is worth defending. That is why this decision deserves an argument rather than a silence—and why I am asking the Court to use Article 37 § 2 and restore to its list the cases that were argued and ready for judgment.  

That safeguard of restoring the cases comes with conditions, and I should say plainly how I read them. Before restoring an application, the Court says it would have regard to whether developments permit the resumption of adversarial proceedings, address the obstacles arising from the absence of cooperation by the former respondent State, and affirm the binding force of its judgments. Those three requirements track the three refusals the decision itself identifies as the circumstances behind the strike-out: to take part in the proceedings, to file observations in communicated cases, and to recognize any obligation to comply. 

The first two involve facts about particular applications, not about the Russian Federation at large. In seven of the nine I can describe, neither obstacle arose: the cases were put to Russia, Russia answered, and the exchange closed before it stopped answering. I am not asking the Court to find that circumstances have changed in those cases. I am saying that two of the three conditions never arose in them. The third is not something an applicant can supply. But the decision itself says that a judgment “retains declaratory value irrespective of the respondent State’s current position.” If that is so, delivering these judgments would affirm their binding force. Striking the applications out affirms nothing. 

Dr. Anton Burkov is the founder of the Strategic Litigation Center and a country conditions expert witness on Russia in United States immigration and asylum proceedings. He represented the applicants in Sablina and Others v. Russia, Mardar v. Russia, Valyushchenko v. Russia and six other applications struck out by the European Court of Human Rights on September 3, 2026, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholars Program Fellow with the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program in Spring 2020, where he prepared the Mardar application to the ECHR. 

---

Views expressed on Harvard Human Rights Reflections are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of the Human Rights Program or Harvard Law School.