EU Partners and their Responses to Russia

EU Partners and their Responses to Russia by Dr. Bill Bowring & ' ( ) & INTRODUCTION In this contribution to the EU Russia Centre Review the author analyses the responses to Russia’s human rights policies and practices by the EU’s key partners, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe (CoE). Russia is not and will not in the foreseeable future be a member of the EU, but it was a founder member of the OSCE in its previous manifestation as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975; and has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1996. Firstly, the author looks briefly at the history of the Russian empire and the USSR towards the rule of law and human rights. Secondly, he turns to the CSCE/OSCE. Thirdly, he considers Russia’s turbulent relationship with the Council of Europe. RUSSIA’S HISTORY The author has recently written on this topic at greater length38. In brief, it should be borne in mind that Russia enjoyed significant legal reform prior to its accession to the Council of Europe. Law as an academic discipline was born in Russia in the 18th century, the century of Enlightenment. It is well known that Voltaire corresponded with the Empress Catherine II (the Great), and that Denis Diderot travelled to St Petersburg and held intensive discussions with her. But it is less well known that the systematic teaching of law was decisively influenced by the Enlightenment. The first Russian professor of law, S. E. Desnitsky (1740 1789) studied in Scotland, under Adam Smith and others, from 1761 to 1767. He was awarded a Doctorate of Civil and Church Law from the University of Glasgow. He became the mechanism for transmission of the ideas of Smith and of David Hume, and as well as the Scottish emphasis on Roman law traditions and principles. This was an important part of Scotland’s defence of its distinctive legal traditions as against the English common law39. In 1768, on the basis of his studies, Desnitsky presented Catherine with his "Remarks on the institutions of legislative, judicial and penitentiary powers in the Russian Empire", proposing radical reforms, including the abolition of serfdom. These were not acted upon for a further hundred years. Nevertheless, Desnitsky survived Catherine's rejection of his proposals, and he became a full professor of law in 1777, shortly after the Pugachev uprising. He published books introducing Russians to the ideas of Adam Smith and John Millar. At Catherine's own instruction, he translated 38 “Russia and Human Rights: Incompatible Opposites?” Vol 1, No 2 (2009) Göttingen Journal of International Law pp. 257-278 at http://gojil.uni-goettingen.de/ojs/index.php/gojil/article/view/37/bowring.pdf 39 lan Watson Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law (1993) 26 into Russian volume 1 of Blackstone's Commentaries, and this was published in Moscow in 1780 3. His courses included the history of Russian law, Justinian's , and comparisons of 40 Roman and Russian law . He died in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, and the * + . To this day, Russia has an impressive legal academy and significant research publication. This is not known in the West simply because of the general absence of translation. It is a great mistake to regard Russia’s legal history as an intellectual wasteland. The reforms proposed by Desnitsky were finally implemented following Russia’s traumatic defeat by England and France in the Crimean War (1853 1856). Russia had regarded itself as invincible following the defeat of Napoleon and the arrival of the Russian army in Paris in 1814. Tsar Alexander (Aleksandr) II (1855 1881) came to the throne determined to force through radical reforms41. Starting with the revolutionary Law on Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, Alexander’s reforms culminated in the Laws on Judicial Reform of 20 November 186442. The new laws introduced a truly adversarial criminal justice procedure, and made trial by jury obligatory in criminal proceedings. Judges were given the opportunity to establish real independence, in part by freeing them of the duty of gathering evidence, and enabling them to act as a free umpire between the parties. The Procuracy lost its powers of "general review of legality", and became a state prosecutor on the Western model. Justices of the Peace were instituted. As Samuel Kucherov wrote in 1953, "Between 1864 and 1906, Russia offered the example of a state unique in political history, where the judicial power was based on democratic principles, whereas the legislature and executive powers remained completely autocratic."43 Despite the reactionary policies pursued by Alexander III and Nikolai II, the essence of these reforms continued until the Bolshevik Revolution. While most of Alexander’s reforms were reversed during the Soviet period; in the 1920s the USSR adopted a European, continental “civil law” Napoleonic codified legal system, with civil and criminal codes drawing from German models. Moreover, it would be inaccurate to say that the USSR had no place for human rights44. Stalin’s Constitution, approved on 5 December 1936, shortly after the USSR joined the League of Nations in September 1934, contained paper guarantees of a number of fundamental rights. Nikolai Bukharin, the best known member of the drafting Commission, who later boasted that he had written the text from the first word to the last, believed that the Constitution would be implemented. But he was himself a victim of the Great Purge, and was 40 William Butler Russian Law, (1999), pp.24-25, and 52-53. See also A. Brown, The Father of Russian Jurisprudence: The Legal Thought of S. E. Desnitskii, in William Butler (ed) Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives (1977) pp. 117-42. 41 Bill Bowring Rejected organs? The efficacy of legal transplantation, and the ends of human rights in the Russian Federation, in Esin Orucu (ed), Judicial Comparativism in Human Rights Cases (2003) 159-182 42 O. I Chistyakov , T. E Novitskaya (eds) Reformi Aleksandr II (Reforms of Aleksandr II) (1998) 43 S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (1953), p.215 44 Bill Bowring Human Rights in Russia: Discourse of Emancipation or only a Mirage? In Istvan Pogany (ed) Human Rights in Eastern Europe (1995) 87-109, at 96-97 27 executed in 1938 after a show trial. The “first generation” civil and political rights, including rights to personal security and liberty, freedom of expression and freedom of association, were never respected and indeed were constantly violated, despite the USSR’s ratification in 1973 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). However, the USSR not only prioritised the “second generation” social and economic rights, but to a considerable extent implemented them in practice. Adopted two years after the USSR’s participation in the of 1975 which launched the CSCE, the Brezhnev USSR Constitution of 1977 (which provided the model for the 1978 Constitutions of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) and the Union Republics) contained Chapter 7, entitled “Basic Rights, Freedoms and Obligations of the Citizens of the USSR”. The promise of the right to work (Art.40), the right to leisure (Art.41), the right to health care (Art.42), the right to social security (Art.43), the right to housing (Art.44), the right to education (art.45), and the right to use the achievements of culture (Art.46) were all, to a greater extent, as with work, education and health care, or to a lesser extent, as with housing, fulfilled by the state. The USSR ratified not only the ICCPR, but all the UN human rights treaties, however, until very late, it insisted on the principle of non interference in its internal affairs. This changed when, on 10 February 1989, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet passed a Decree recognising the compulsory jurisdiction of the UN’s International Court of Justice with respect to six UN human rights conventions45. And on 5 July 1991 the Supreme Soviet adopted two Resolutions acceding to the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on, and recognising the jurisdiction of, the HRC46. THE CSCE/OSCE Brownlie and Goodwin Gill have correctly stated that the Council of Europe was “… an organisation created in 1949 as a sort of social and ideological counterpart to the military aspects of European co operation represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. [It] was inspired partly by interest in the promotion of European unity, and partly by the political desire for solidarity in the face of the ideology of Communism.” In other words, the Western European states wished to demonstrate that they were as serious about the “first generation”, civil and political rights, as the USSR and its allies undoubtedly were with regard to the “second generation” social and economic rights. But if the Council of Europe was a product of the onset of the Cold War, the CSCE/OSCE was the fruit of the so called period of détente, from the late 1960s until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This was the achievement of Leonid Brezhnev, who was General Secretary of the CPSU 45 Reported in (1989) 4 Interights Bulletin 3: the treaties were the 1948 Genocide Convention; the 1984 Convention Against Torture: the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of Traffic of Persons; the 1952 Convention on the Political Rights of Women; the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. 46 Vedomosti SSSR, 1991 No.29, pp. 842, 843 28 from 1964 to 1982, and Richard Nixon, who was President of the USA from 1969 to 1974. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co operation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) was adopted in Helsinki on 1 August 1975, as the culmination of a process which had started on 3 July 1973. It was signed by 35 states including the USA and the USSR. There are now 56 participating states. Unlike the EU and Council of Europe it is not a legal, treaty based organisation, but is purely political. Its strength is derived from the fact that, in addition to 54 European and former Soviet states, the USA and Canada are members. Under Section VII, entitled Respect for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, including the Freedom of Thought, Conscience, Religion and Belief, the participating States recognised “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms”. At the time, the Helsinki Final Act was seen as a diplomatic triumph for Brezhnev, whose chief motivation was to secure the ratification of the status quo in Europe, especially the divided Germany. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had been admitted to the United Nations (with the Federal Republic of Germany) on 18 September 1973, and the GDR’s participation in the negotiations, and adherence to the Helsinki Final Act, gave its leader Erich Honecker a great deal of satisfaction. Helsinki also contributed materially to the eventual demise of the GDR – one of the few states in history to have disappeared entirely 14 years later, in 1989. The real effect of Helsinki was that the GDR lost any remaining legitimacy in the eyes of its own population. This was also the beginning of the end for the USSR. According to Gaddis47, "… Brezhnev had looked forward, [Anatoly] Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the post war boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems at least the more courageous could claim official permission to say what they thought." Gaddis also stated that “Although Reagan had opposed the Helsinki Conference, which he regarded shortsightedly as having ratified Soviet control over Eastern Europe, by 1979 he was acknowledging that "something [is] going on behind the Iron Curtain that we've been ignoring and [that offers] hope for all mankind. . . . [A] little less détente . . . and more encouragement to the dissidents might be worth a lot of armoured divisions."”48 One feature of the aftermath of Helsinki was that nothing much changed with regard to the USSR’s internal policy towards human rights activism – the dissidents. The Soviet human rights movement had come into existence in 1967, led and inspired by the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. In 1969 a group of some 14 activists, including Sergei Kovalyov, the future Russian Human Rights 47 John Lewis Gaddis (2006) The Cold War: A New History (London: Penguin); cited at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2L9A6JJKDA5S/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm 48 John Lewis Gaddis (2004) lecture "Strategies of Containment: Post-Cold War Reconsiderations" at The Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, 15 April, at http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/news/transcripts/gaddis.html 29 Ombudsman49, set up the “Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR”. They compiled the “Chronicle of Current Events”, the first samizdat (self published) human rights bulletin. In September 1974, while the Helsinki negotiations were proceeding, Kovalyov became a member of the Moscow Group of Amnesty International. Within months, on 28 December 1974, he was arrested, and charged with “Anti Soviet Agitation and Propaganda” under the notorious Article 70 of the then Criminal Code, and put on trial. Sakharov, on the day of the presentation of his Nobel Peace Prize (for which he was refused permission to travel) in 1975, picketed the court. Kovalyov was sentenced to seven years in a forced labour camp, followed by three years internal exile in Magadan, in the Soviet Far East. Kovalyov was only permitted to return home to Moscow in 1987, after Gorbachev had come to power. Thus, the Helsinki process conferred vital legitimacy on human rights activists and on the ideology of universal human rights, and played a crucial role in helping the system to undermine itself, in the USSR and in all its Eastern European satellites. Russia succeeded to the USSR’s membership of the OSCE, but, since Vladimir Putin became President in 2000, Russia has frequently criticised the OSCE for paying too little attention to political, military, and economic issues – the original focus of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and of the CSCE conferences instead highlighting the much more sensitive issues of human rights and democratic elections, and focusing almost exclusively on former Soviet Union states. In late 2005 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) had become too independent. He argued that it required more specific directions to guide its work; it had failed to apply “equal treatment” to its election monitoring activities. Russia urged the OSCE to apply its “original comprehensive approach” to the “new” transnational security challenges of international terrorism and the illicit manufacture and trafficking of weapons, and has also sought the allocation of a greater share of resources to economic development programmes in countries located “east of Vienna.”50 On 26 December 2007, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko announced Russia's intention to reduce payments – presently only 6% of the total51. During 2007 Russia withdrew from the adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, which limits the deployment of heavy weaponry between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains. The OSCE's annual ministerial council in November 2007, held in Madrid, also ended without a final declaration after Moscow blocked agreement on a number of issues. Russia was, of course, angry at the decision of ODIHR not to observe the parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia. 49 Bill Bowring (1998) "Sergei Kovalyov: The First Russian Human Rights Ombudsman - and the Last?" in Rein Mullerson, Malgosia Fitzmaurice and Mads Adenas (eds) Constitutional Reform and International Law in Central and Eastern Europe (Leiden: Kluwer Law International), pp. 235-256 50 See Richard Weitz “Russia and the United States wrestle for control of the OSCE agenda”, Eurasia Insight 1 August 2007, at http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav010807a.shtml 51 See Claire Bigg “Russia: Moscow Bares Its Teeth, Signaling Tough Time For OSCE” RFE/RL January 4, 2008, republished at JRL 2008-4 30 As the author commented in a previous EU Russia Centre Review, it was not surprising that, on 25 July 2008, the daily , published an article entitled “Russia to withdraw money from 52 OSCE” . The previous day, Igor Borisov of the Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation had announced at a press conference that “if the OSCE will not take the further steps on the road to democracy” then Moscow may refuse to pay its annual subscription to ODIHR. The amount paid by Russia had fallen by half in the previous five years, and was by then $6 million a year. At the same time, Mr Borisov declared that the CEC had in its possession facts according to which the members of OSCE’s monitoring missions included officers of Western intelligence services. “We had thought that OSCE would be the central pillar of European security, but it has fallen into the hands of countries which use it in their own interests”, a senior Russian diplomat told , . On 30 September 2010, the Russian MFA spokesman Andrei Nesterenko gave a briefing at the OSCE Review Conference opening in Warsaw53, in which he restated Russia’s grievances: “Russia has faithfully fulfilled and will continue to fulfil all the political commitments it assumed within the OSCE. We urge all other member states to do the same. We call for reviewing the political commitments that have been unjustly forgotten, such as the freedom of movement/liberalisation of visa regimes in the first place… We consider it necessary to begin serious work on correcting imbalances in the work of the OSCE institutions and field missions, which today, unfortunately, is characterised by a “selective” approach and focuses mainly on the countries “east of Vienna.” We consistently advocate transforming the OSCE into a fully fledged intergovernmental organisation that works according to clearly defined, collectively agreed rules. An important step in this direction would be adoption of a Charter of the OSCE.” Actually, in the present author’s view, the final point is a rather constructive proposal. THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE EUROPE The Council of Europe’s invitation to Russia and Russia’s political decisions to accede to the CoE on 28 February 1996 and to ratify the European Convention of Human Rights on 5 May 1998, were truly controversial on both sides54. The USSR had considered that the principles of state sovereignty and non interference in internal affairs were the two cornerstones of international law, yet even the Communists and nationalists in the Russian parliament voted in favour. Russia was now accepting 52 Vladimir Solovyov and Irina Nagornikh “Rossiya otzyvaet sredstva iz OBSE” Kommersant No. 129(3946) of 25 July 2008, at http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=915660; shortened English version at http://www.kommersant.com/p915660/OSCE_ODIHR_funding/ 53 http://www.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/171aab5ddf3ec3c2c32575d7004629c8/e02dd77b9dcefc2fc32577b1002571f4?Op enDocument (accessed on 14 November 2010) 54 See Bill Bowring Russia’s Accession to the Council of Europe and Human Rights: Compliance or Cross-Purposes? 6 (1997) European Human Rights Law Review, 629; Bill Bowring, Russia's Accession to the Council of Europe and Human Rights: Four Years On 4 (2000) European Human Law Review, 362 31 an unprecedented degree of external supervision and intervention, with the prospect of compulsory judgments and the payment of large sums of compensation. It was perhaps even more surprising that the Council of Europe was prepared to accept Russia, given that the First Chechen War was in full swing. The first judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Russia was that in 55 in 2002. To Russia’s shame, failure to comply with the judgment of the ECtHR in (( that case led to another judgment in 2009, (( - .56. In this case the applicant, a veteran of Chernobyl, complained of the non payment of compensation owed to him as the result of judgments of the Russian courts and of the ECtHR. In this repeat complaint the ECtHR not only ordered Russia to pay Mr Burdov €6,000, but also held that these violations “… originated in a practice incompatible with the Convention which consists in the State’s recurrent failure to honour judgment debts and in respect of which aggrieved parties have no effective domestic remedy.” The Court also delivered what is in effect the first “pilot judgment” against Russia, and ordered that: “the respondent State must set up, within six months from the date on which the judgment becomes final, an effective domestic remedy or combination of such remedies which secures adequate and sufficient redress for non enforcement or delayed enforcement of domestic judgments in line with the Convention principles as established in the Court’s case law; The respondent State must grant such redress, within one year from the date on which the judgment becomes final, to all victims of non payment or unreasonably delayed payment by State authorities of a judgment debt in their favour who lodged their applications with the Court before the delivery of the present judgment and whose applications were communicated to the Government…” Russia has responded. On 25 March 2010 President Medvedev submitted a draft Federal Law “On compensation of citizens for violation of the right to a fair trial within reasonable time or the right to execution of a judgment within a reasonable time.” This law was designed to answer the demands of the ECtHR in Burdov No.2 (above), and entered into force on 4 May 2010. The courts have already started receiving applications. Russia has lost a number of other high profile cases in the Strasbourg Court. In May 2004, in 57 the Court held that Russia had acted in bad faith in using the criminal justice / )( system to force a commercial deal, by arresting the TV magnate. In July 2004, in Ilaşcu and Others v Moldova and Russia58 the majority of the Grand Chamber of the Court found that Russia rendered support to Transdniestria, which broke away from Moldova, amounting to “effective control”. The 55 Application no. 59498/00, Judgment of 7 May 2002 Application no. 33509/04, Judgment of 15 January 2009 57 Application no. 70276/01, Judgment of 19 May 2004 58 Application no. 48787/99, Judgment of 8 July 2004 56 32 first six Chechen applicants against Russia won their applications to Strasbourg in February 60, the Court condemned 200559. In April 2005 in ) ( 0. ( / Russia for deliberately refusing to cooperate with the Court despite diplomatic assurances; and in October 2002 the Court had given “interim measures” indicating to Georgia that Chechens who had fled to Georgia should not be extradited to Russia pending the Court’s consideration. 61. In April 2006, Mr Aleksanyan, then Perhaps the most scandalous case was % ) ( the executive vice president of Yukos Oil Company, was detained on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. He was diagnosed as HIV positive, and doctors recommended that he be given antiretroviral treatment. However, Mr Aleksanyan was denied treatment. The Russian authorities claimed both publicly and in submissions to the Court that Mr Aleksanyan had refused treatment; this was refuted by documentary evidence. Mr Aleksanyan complained to the Strasbourg Court in 2006. On 28 November 2007, the Court issued an interim measure indicating that Russia must “secure immediately…the in patient treatment of the applicant [Mr Aleksanyan] in a hospital specialised in the treatment of AIDS and concomitant diseases.” On 6 December 2007, the Court expressed concern that the interim measure had not been fully executed and added that “if necessary the Government can take security measures in order to guarantee proper proceedings in the conduct of the applicant’s case and secure his appearance at trial.” On 21 December 2007, the court again reminded the government that interim measures are binding, and warned that should Mr Aleksanyan die in custody or his health deteriorate further because of a lack of proper treatment, the ECtHR might hold Russia accountable for a violation of the right to life or for inhuman and degrading treatment. In late January 2008, the Court again reminded the Russian Government of the interim measure. Only on 6 February 2008 did the Simonovskiy District Court in Moscow order that Mr Aleksanyan’s trial should be halted and that he should be treated62. Even then there was a delay in allowing him to be treated outside prison. Thus, the Russian Government disobeyed the clear and binding order of the Strasbourg Court, repeated three times, for more than two months. On 22 December 2008, the Court found that Russia had violated Article 3, 5 and 8 of the Convention, and furthermore, that by failing to comply with the interim measures, the Russian Government also failed to honour its commitments under Article 34 of the Convention. Immediately following the judgment in Burdov No.2, the Russian judge on the Strasbourg Court, Anatoliy Kovler, delivered a stark warning at a meeting with the Russian Constitutional Court in St Petersburg on Friday 27 February 2009. Kovler reviewed the results for Russia before the ECtHR in 2008 and asserted that, if Russia within the next six months failed to resolve the “systemic 59 These applicants were represented, from 2000, by the author and his colleagues from the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, which he founded, in partnership with the Russian human rights NGO “Memorial”, with EU funding, in 2003. 60 Application no. 36378/02, [2005] ECHR 233, Judgment of 12 April 2005 61 Application no. 46468/06, Judgment of 22 December 2008, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/496369822.html [accessed 14 November 2010] 62 ‘Pokoi strogogo rezhima’, Novaya gazeta, 21 February 2008. 33 problem” of failure to execute court decisions, this could lead to termination of Russian membership in the Council of Europe. Kovler observed that 2008 had witnessed a “falling dynamic” and a “saturated market” of complaints against Russia. In 2008, 10,500 applicants had complained to the ECtHR, however the number of complaints found to be admissible had risen, while the number of judgments was a record, 269. The Court had issued 40 findings of non effective investigation of crimes in Chechnya, and for the first time had found in more than 20 cases “the absence of effective remedies” for Russians in relation to wrongful use of detention as a pre trial “measure of restraint”, and in relation to conditions in remand prisons (SIZOs). But the most glaring tendency of 2008 had been the lengthy non execution of judgments of Russian courts and the absence of a mechanism for payment of damages by the government for unlawful actions of judges. Some 72% of judgments against Russia at the ECtHR concerned this problem, and there were now more than 5,000 of them awaiting decisions. As I show below, this situation has further deteriorated. At a conference in Moscow on Friday 18 December 2009, Judge Kovler, again focused on the unprecedented number of applications made to the Court from Russia: 14,000 by the end of 2009, a rise of 13 17%, and one third of the total number of applications to the Court from all 47 member states. In Kovler’s words, the question of conditions in the SIZOs (pre trial detention prisons) became “actual” in 2009 in connection with the Aleksanyan case and now “this problem cries out about itself in connection with the death in a SIZO of the lawyer Sergey Magnitsky.”63 After a very long delay, on Friday 15 January 2010 the State Duma voted to ratify Protocol 14 to the ECHR64. On 1 June 2010 Protocol 14 at last came into force, having been ratified by all 47 member states of the Council of Europe65. However, the best estimates are that the procedural reforms introduced may help to reduce the Court’s workload by 25%, when, as can be seen, it continues to increase at a very rapid rate. Russia continues to be a major contributor to the ongoing crisis of the ECHR system. According to the Court’s statistics as of 1 January 2010, the total number of judgments against Russia since accession was 862, of which 815 were violation judgments and 28 no violation judgments. There were 36,083 inadmissibility decisions: a very high proportion of complaints against Russia are dismissed without a hearing. But as of the start of this year, there were 33,568 applications pending against Russia. Of course, Russia’s size and very large population, at least 140 million, are factors, and Georgiy Matyushkin, Russia’s permanent representative and agent at the Court, has 63 http://www.newsru.com/arch/russia/18dec2009/kovler.html (accessed on 26 April 2010) See http://www.newsru.com/arch/russia/15jan2010/14.html (last visited 21 July 2010), and Bill Bowring “The Russian Federation, Protocol No. 14 (and 14bis), and the Battle for the Soul of the ECHR” Goettingen Journal of International Law 2 (2010) 2, 589-617 65 See Anton Burkov, “Improvement in Compliance of the Russian Judicial System with the International Obligations Undertaken by the Russian Federation” (28 June 2010) available at http://www.eurussiacentre.org/our-publications/column/improvement-compliance-russian-judicial-system-internationalobligations-undertaken-russian-federation.html (last visited 21 July 2010). 64 34 pointed out that if the number of applications are counted per 100,000 population, then Russia is in 15th or 16th place out of 4766. This is in the context in which as of the end of October 2010 there were 141,450 applications pending, an increase of 19% from the same period in 2009. During the same period only 1,757 judgments were delivered, 3% fewer than in 2009, while 27,348 cases were found inadmissible or struck out, an increase of 4%. It is readily apparent that the Court is drowning. CONCLUSION It may be seen from the analysis above that the context of the EU’s human rights policy towards Russia, as concerns the EU’s partner international organisations is complex and not encouraging. Russia has a record of continual protest with respect to the OSCE, and has been convicted many times of flagrant violation of the ECHR. Yet as Burkov has shown, the Convention and its case law, which are part of Russian law, are increasingly referred to and sometimes followed in judicial proceedings, and the new generations of lawyers are trained in the principles of the ECHR. Every lawyer in Russia, and many people without legal representation, especially prisoners, have heard of the Strasbourg Court, and the flood of applications that come from every part of Russia. That in itself is a highly positive indicator. The European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, founded by the author in 2003, with lawyers in Moscow and several regions, provides competent advice and representation to hundreds of applicants, as do its sister organisations, Stichtung Russian Justice Initiative, and Karina Moskalenko’s Sodeistviye (Cooperation). And many Russian non lawyers have become rather expert. On 12 January 2011 the author and his EHRAC colleagues will represent the 67 before the Grand Chamber. Mr Kotov, representing himself without a applicant in , ( ( lawyer, won against Russia before the Chamber – this will be Russia’s appeal. On the other hand, Mr Kotov complained to the Court in 2000, ten years ago. This is in itself a dismal commentary on the crisis of the system as a whole. In the opinion of the author, the OSCE will have to look after itself, and there is probably little that the EU could or should do to support it, other than developing a more focused and trenchant foreign policy under the post Lisbon arrangements. The Council of Europe is another matter. The EU provides very significant funding for the Council’s initiatives, including awareness raising and training in Russia. The author is an expert for the EU CoE Joint Programme on Minorities in Russia, and the EU has provided nearly €3 million for three years. The objective of the Programme is to assist Russia in ratification of the CoE’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The CoE and EU share the objective of protecting and enhancing linguistic diversity. The EU itself organises and funds large scale projects on judicial reform and strengthening of the rule of law in Russia. The way forward must be an intensification of this impressive effort. 66 67 http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=1375901 (accessed on 14 November 2010) Application No. 54522/00 35