Deceptive numbers – Russia get 1st place for pending human rights cases

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Published: 29 January, 2010, 22:40

TAGS: Russia, Human rights, Prime Time Russia

Russia has the dubious honor of having the largest number of pending complaints filed against it in the European Court of Human Rights in 2009. But some say that the figures are worse than they look.

As stated in the official court press release, “as in 2008, 4 States (Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Romania) were the source of almost 56% of the pending applications: in particular 28.1% of the cases were directed against Russia, 11% Turkey, 8.4% Ukraine and 8.2% Romania."

Experts say, however, that the main reason behind Russia’s leadership in this particular category is the size of its population. As Georgy Matyushkin, the country’s representative to the Court of Human Rights pointed out, if the ranking was done by cases per capita, Russia wouldn’t be nearly as high up.

According to Matyushkin, if you take the size of the population into account, “The Russian Federation would be in 15th or 16th place out of 47 members of the Council of Europe”.

Referring to last year’s results, court President Jean-Paul Costa welcomed the Russian parliament’s ratification of Protocol 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Russia was the last Council of Europe member to ratify the document, which sets out the reforms of the Strasbourg court.