Moscow Finally Backs Rights Court

The country dropped its long-standing blockade of a much-needed reform of the European Court of Human Rights on Friday when the State Duma ratified Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Deputies voted 392-56 for the reform, with opposition coming from the Communist and the Liberal Democrats’ factions, Interfax reported.

The vote came as little surprise because United Russia, the ruling party that commands a two-thirds parliamentary majority, had announced in December that it would review its position after President Dmitry Medvedev asked deputies to take a fresh look at the matter.

United Russia and the Foreign Ministry said the Council of Europe, the organization overseeing the court, had made concessions that addressed all their reservations. Council of Europe officials, however, stressed that no changes to the protocol had been made.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the council’s secretary-general, promised during a visit to Moscow last month that ratification would significantly increase Russia’s influence over future reforms of the 47-member organization, Kommersant reported Saturday.

One of the reforms that Jagland will suggest this week is to strengthen the link between a member’s budget contributions and its number of staff in the council, the report said.

Such a reform would greatly benefit Russia, which last year contributed 12 percent to the council’s budget. “If this is implemented, the number of Russians in the council will be doubled,” an unidentified source in Strasbourg, the seat of the organization, told Kommersant.

Jagland on Friday praised the Duma’s ratification, saying in a statement that “Russia is sending a strong signal of its commitment to Europe.”

The country had been the only Council of Europe member that refused to ratify the protocol, despite the fact that a third of the cases flooding the court come from Russia.

Moscow’s blockade has been explained by its frustration over the court’s many rulings that faulted basic human rights in Russia. The Duma rejected the reform in December 2006, and officials later frequently accused the court of political bias.

Human Rights Watch said last fall that Russia has ignored more than 100 court rulings, many of which found authorities responsible for killings, abductions and torture in Chechnya.

The reform stipulates that a single judge will be able to decide on the admissibility of applications and a three-judge panel will rule on most cases.

This is meant to greatly speed up the court’s work, which currently has a backlog of more than 120,000 cases, which might require seven years’ work.

Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov told Duma deputies on Friday that Moscow had received assurances that its representative in the court would be invited to join hearings of appeals filed by Russians.

He also said the Council of Europe would consult with the government on how to enforce the court’s rulings.

Denisov stressed that all changes had been agreed in writing.

“For years, the Russian side has demanded changes so that Protocol 14 becomes compatible with Russian law. Now that our criticism has been met, we can ratify this document,” Ruslan Kondratov, a member of the Duma’s International Relations Committee, said in a statement posted on United Russia’s web site.

But Andreas Gross, a Swiss Social Democrat member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, dismissed allegations of political horse-trading over reforming the Court of Human Rights. “This is out of the question because one of the court’s founding principles is its independence,” he said by telephone from Strasbourg.

Gross said the ratification represented a significant victory of Medvedev over Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“I have the impression that the leadership is split on this issue. This is the first time that those taking human rights seriously have won the upper hand, and I assume that these are the forces grouped around the president and not the prime minister,” Gross said.

The ratification process will be completed when the Federation Council votes on the protocol. A date for that has not been set.

Communists and Liberal Democrats argued that the new rules ran counter to the country’s interests. “We give more money than all others [to the Council of Europe], yet we are despised and ignored,” Liberal Democratic leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in the Duma on Friday, the Gazeta newspaper reported on its web site.

Communist Deputy Sergei Reshulsky said the changes were just formalities and would not substantially improve the court’s quality.

The Communists themselves have appealed to the Strasbourg court over the results of the 2007 Duma elections.

But opposition to the protocol was not unanimous in either party.

Communist Deputy Oleg Smolin told The Moscow Times that he voted for ratification because “the state has changed in character, and now it is persecuting its own citizens.”

And Liberal Democrat lawmaker Leonid Slutsky, a first deputy chairman of the Duma’s International Affairs Committee, acknowledged that the previous refusal “impeded Russian influence on the development of European institutions,” Itar-Tass reported.

The ratification will help the Strasbourg court “to look at Russia objectively and without bias,” he said.

Media reports have linked the protocol issue to last week’s surprise decision by the Strasbourg court to postpone a hearing on the Yukos case, suggesting that Moscow had threatened to rethink ratification otherwise.

The court said last Tuesday that a hearing scheduled for Thursday had been moved to March because Russia’s representative and its judge were unavailable.

Former Yukos managers are suing Russia for $100 billion, making the case the biggest in terms of damages.

But Georgy Matyushkin, the Kremlin’s representative at the court, on Friday, dismissed any such links, explaining that the postponement had only two reasons: “The illness of the Russian judge and the fact that I had to attend the Duma ratification,” he said, Interfax reported.

Matyushkin said the protocol’s ratification would not have any effect on the Yukos hearing.