The Pitfalls and Promises of Human Rights Claims in the Chechen Wars: Russia at the European Court

Russia’s brutal wars against the separatist republic of Chechnya, starting in the mid-1990s, entailed untold numbers of war crimes and human rights abuses, including kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, torture, murder, and vast destruction of property and civilian life by aerial bombardment and artillery barrages. Blocked from pursuing justice through the Russian courts or by having the Russian government fulfill its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, victims instead worked with activists and lawyers to bring cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Starting in 2003, the Court has found against Russia in some 250 cases – in effect bringing the higher standards of human rights law to the domain of armed conflict, normally regulated (with mixed success) by international humanitarian law (“laws of war”). The first step in the process of understanding this normative change is to identify and understand the transformation: from a normative standpoint, the Court rulings constitute a major achievement for civilian protections during wartime; they build on earlier precedents in cases against Turkey and the United Kingdom, which not only expand protections for civilians but also extend the espace juridique of the Court’s competence beyond Europe to include, for example, British military forces in Iraq. The second step provides a social-sciences perspective by adding an empirical dimension to the study of these cases. We see that the actual consequences of the Court’s decisions on the military practices of Russia and other states have been limited and may even portend a backlash that could undermine protections for civilians in warfare. The last step of normative analysis suggests that even if appeals to a court of human rights might not serve the goal of reducing war crimes in general, the use of human-rights norms retains a certain plausibility to the extent that if offers victims an opportunity to present their claims and seek remedies.