The European Court of Human Rights has struck out 879 applications against Russia in Lebedeva and others v. Russia (application no. 49120/07), ending the claims of 1,483 individual applicants, many of whom alleged serious human rights violations including killings by Russian forces in Chechnya and the death of an activist after authorities failed to investigate threats against him.

The Decision

The Court applied Article 37(1)(c) of the European Convention, holding that further examination of these applications would be a disproportionate use of its resources. The struck-out cases, in the Court's view, were neither of sufficient importance nor sufficiently repetitive to justify continued adjudication.

The operative language of the ruling states: "While the Court does not overlook the individual interest which each applicant has in obtaining an adjudication of his or her complaints, it is however unable to identify any commensurate Convention benefit, whether for the applicants, individually or collectively, or for the development and effective functioning of the Convention system, capable of justifying such an allocation of resources."

The Court structured its disposal of the Russian docket in four categories: it decided 600 individual applications of "marked importance" or raising legal issues of general importance through Chamber judgments, including three Grand Chamber decisions; Committee formations decided thousands of further applications, likely the bulk of approximately 17,000 processed since 2022; the 879 applications struck out in Lebedeva fell outside both categories; and "conflict-related" cases remain retained. A July update recorded 6,642 pending applications against Russia; subtracting the struck-out cases leaves 5,763 on the docket.

The Court decided the cases of "marked importance" in 60 Chamber judgments and one Grand Chamber judgment across four themes: repression of political opposition, suppression of civil society as "foreign agents," freedom of expression, and treatment of particularly vulnerable individuals. It cited examples including Navalnyy v. Russia (no. 4) and Novaya Gazeta and Others v. Russia.

Criticism of the Criteria

Legal commentators have sharply criticized the decision. Amnesty International said it deprives victims of their "last hope of seeing justice." Two prominent Russian human rights lawyers, Vaypan and Sekretareva, writing in the Moscow Times, called it "one of the most shameful decisions the ECHR has adopted in its entire existence."

Critics identify two problematic new distinctions. The term "marked importance" does not appear in the Court's Priority Policy, and according to HUDOC, this is the first and only use of the term in the case law. The Court's definition of "conflict-related" cases — limited to applications associated with interstate cases such as Georgia v. Russia and Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia — excludes cases arising from the non-international armed conflict in Chechnya, including Abuyeva v. Russia, which was struck out. The Court provided no reasoning for preferring cases from international armed conflicts over those from non-international conflicts.

The decision follows the precedent of Burmych and others v. Ukraine and Turan and others v. Turkey, but critics note two significant differences: in both earlier cases the violating states remained Convention members, and the applicants' interests had some protection through the execution process or partial satisfaction. In Lebedeva, by contrast, Russia has withdrawn from the Convention and will not engage or pay compensation.

Practical Consequences

For practitioners, the ruling closes the final avenue of adjudication for nearly 1,500 applicants. The struck-out cases represent 1.6 percent of the Court's total caseload and 13 percent of its caseload against Russia. An empirical study on Turkish cases at the Court showed that survivors value recognition of injustice more than monetary compensation — a dimension critics say the Court's brief assessment of victims' interests failed to address. The Court emphasized five times that Russia's situation constitutes "exceptional circumstances," but commentators including Judge Kūris — who partially dissented in Turan, warning that such rulings send "a signal that a member State can escape responsibility for violating the Convention en masse" — question whether the decision undermines accountability for mass abuses.