Struggling for Europe’s Soul: The Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights Counter Russia’s Aggression against Ukraine

Abstract

Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe with immediate effect and also from the ECHR with a six-month delay. The expulsion was based on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine which actually began in 2014 and only intensified in 2022. It was inevitable in view of the fact that Russia had not only distanced itself from the values of the CoE and the ECHR, but started to actively undermine them. This becomes evident from an overview of the pertinent case law of the European Court of Human Rights and Russia’s increasingly assertive unwillingness to comply with the Court’s decisions. While the pertinent resolutions by the Committee of Ministers and the ECtHR were made in accordance with the CoE Statute and the ECHR both procedurally and substantively, they should have been better explained to the European and world public. Russia has meanwhile begun to boycott the ECtHR procedures in violation of Art. 58 ECHR.