Russia vs Ukraine at the European Court of Human Rights

Did Russia have territorial control of eastern Ukraine when Flight MH17 was shot down in 2014? This was one of the hot issues discussed this January at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in a case brought by Ukraine and the Netherlands against Russia for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In this new podcast produced by our Asymmetrical Haircuts partners, specialised journalist Molly Quell and law professor Isabella Risini shed light on this issue. The case has already been postponed twice, but the current threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine puts it back in the spotlight.  

MH17 airplane
1 min 19Approximate reading time

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We took a detour to an international court we don’t really follow but that gets mentioned a lot in other case and sets a lot of the precedents for human rights cases : The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) also known as the Strasbourg Court. In January the court held an exceptionally long and raucous hearing concerning, amongst other things, the downing of Flight MH17 in 2014 – when nearly 300 people were killed as their airplane was shot down over Ukraine. The case sees Ukraine and the Netherlands try to hold Russia responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity all over the eastern part of Ukraine (maybe a touch of additional relevance in current circumstances).

We roped in a friend of the show Molly Quell, who did go to France to watch the session in person and covers the court regularly. She writes about international law for Courthouse News Service.

Molly in turn interviewed Isabella Risini, a visiting professor at the University of Augsburg, whose research focuses on the ECHR and in particular, what are called interstate applications, where two countries have a dispute, rather than an individual against a state.

Asymmetrical Haircuts - episode 55 (in partnership with Justice Info)

Asymmetrical Haircuts podcastASYMMETRICAL HAIRCUTS

This podcast has been published as part of a partnership between JusticeInfo.net and Asymmetrical Haircuts, a podcast on international justice produced from The Hague by journalists Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg, who retain full control and independence over the contents of the podcast.