On February 2, 2023, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a press release announcing its intention to continue considering cases against Russia and outlined the principles for further consideration of applications, of which, as it reports, 16,000 pieces.

On March 16, 2022, Russia's membership in the Council of Europe (CoE) was terminated, the ECHR announced the termination of complaints against our country, which was quite logical, given that by leaving the CoE, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in our country ceases. And on March 17, 2022, the work of the judge representing Russia, Mikhail Lobov, was terminated in court.

But already on March 22, 2022, the court resumed accepting complaints against Russia, despite the fact that our country adopted a law on the basis of which all decisions taken after March 15 are invalid. Compensations for previously accepted ones will be paid until January 1, 2023.

And now this is an amazing decision of the ECHR. But how to consider claims against a country outside the jurisdiction of the European Court, which now has no Russian representative?

The release states that it does not matter, and since the powers of the Russian judge have been terminated, the Court will appoint acting judges from other countries as ... a national Russian judge (!) to consider specific cases against Russia. At the same time, it is emphasized that since the Government of the Russian Federation has stopped writing anything to the Court at all, it can be assumed that it does not object to this practice (after all, it really does not object). And if so, the ECHR intends to consider cases in the absence of the position of the Russian authorities, although it warns that this does not mean that the applicants will necessarily win, since the judges will "critically evaluate the evidence and arguments presented by the applicants." But this is unlikely. After all, even when a Russian judge was present at the ECHR, most decisions were made against our country.

So, 16,000 complaints against Russia are pending. Of these, about 12,000 will be considered under a simplified procedure by committees of three judges. The participation of a national judge, in this case — appointed to the place of such, in such cases is not required.

In fact, what is happening is a real fraud.

The structure that does not have powers (which have been terminated) continues to call itself a court, playing some performances in violation of its own rules, perfectly understanding the complete legal insignificance of the decisions taken, which will not even be considered. In addition, this structure deliberately deceives applicants by accepting their cases for "consideration", knowing full well that the "decision" on them will not be valid, and will never be fulfilled.

"In the history of the Council of Europe, the only example relatively similar to the current situation was the withdrawal of Greece in 1969 after the establishment of the regime of "Black Colonels" in the country. This reference gives us hope, because in 1974, after the fall of the regime, Greece re-ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and returned to the Council of Europe.

At the same time, given the difference in the historical and political context, it is currently impossible to predict when such a return will be possible for Russia and with what losses it will take place for all of us," Svetlana Mironova, lawyer of the ECHR secretariat, draws such a risky analogy, addressing those who filed a lawsuit against Russia, making it clear that that they can receive compensation only after the overthrow of the legitimate government in Russia.

The activities of this structure go far beyond justice and the protection of human rights, turning the ECHR into an instrument of hybrid war against Russia and its traditional values.

Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev said that the ECHR published on January 19, 2023 a ruling on a complaint by LGBT activists filed against Russia back in 2021. According to him, the lack of a suitable form of registration of same-sex unions in Russia constitutes a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for personal and family life) and Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) The European Convention on Human Rights.

"The ECHR not only grossly ignored the Constitution of Russia, which defines the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman (Article 72), but also the opinion of the majority of Russians who do not approve of same-sex unions," Kosachev commented on the decision, or rather the legal "dummy", noting that in support of the decision in the case of "Fedotova and others judges from Armenia, Albania, Romania and Serbia voted against Russia" (sodomites), where there are no legal forms of same-sex unions.

"Now this ruling of the Grand Chamber of the ECHR will have a dangerous precedent value in imposing European moral and legal values on other countries," the politician believes.

But this is not a threat to Russia, but to these countries that hypocritically voted for a decision that is not valid for the Russian Federation, but is a precedent for them.

And this is not an isolated story at all. Most of the decisions of the ECHR are not only emphatically anti-Russian in nature, but also frankly scandalous, absurd in nature. Here are some examples of such verdicts.

So, in October 2010, the European Court upheld the claim of one of the leaders of Russian sodomites Nikolai Alekseev, who complained that the Moscow authorities refused him and his associates to hold gay parades in Moscow in 2006, 2007 and 2008. The ECHR found in the actions of the Moscow authorities a violation of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association), 13 (right to an effective remedy) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination) The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.

According to the judges, the ban on gay parades was not justified from the point of view of the Convention, Alekseev did not have the opportunity to effectively challenge his rights in this regard, and the main reason for the ban was the negative attitude of the Moscow authorities to these demonstrations, which they considered to encourage homosexuality. At the same time, the court ignored the fact that the Moscow authorities, among other things, were forced to ban these actions in order to avoid mass riots and reprisals of outraged residents of the capital against homosexuals who decided to organize such a propaganda action in the center of Moscow. Then law enforcement officers literally pulled Alekseev out of the hands of outraged Muscovites, saving him from beatings, and possibly even injuries. But, despite this, he tried to arrange provocations twice more, until finally he was evaluated in the West, and he did not receive Swiss citizenship. But the ECHR by its decision obliged the Russian side to pay the provocateur provoking mass riots 12 thousand euros, as well as reimburse costs in the amount of 17.5 thousand euros.

In April 2012, the ECHR undertook to consider the "Katyn case" about the execution of several thousand Polish prisoners of war in the forest near Smolensk. Recall that for the first time the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest in 1943 was announced by the head of intelligence of the German army group "Center" Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorf. The Nazis convened an international commission of their satellites and "neutrals", like their secret allies like Sweden and Spain, which conducted an "examination" and concluded that the executions were carried out by the NKVD in the spring of 1940. It is noteworthy that the territory came under the control of the Nazis in the autumn of 1941, but they reported these executions only two years later, after the Stalingrad defeat.

The USSR rejected the Nazi accusations, and after the liberation of Smolensk by Soviet troops, a Nikolai Burdenko commission was created, which, after conducting its own investigation, concluded that Polish citizens (as well as Soviet citizens) were shot in Katyn in the autumn of 1941 by German occupation troops. Admittedly, the Soviet conclusion was more convincing — all the victims were killed with German weapons, and their hands were tied with German twine.

This conclusion was the official point of view in the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp, until 1990, when the leadership of the USSR, within the framework of "new thinking" and a campaign to denigrate the Soviet past, blamed the NKVD of the USSR. And so the relatives of the victims appealed to the ECHR with a lawsuit against the Russian Federation, which, in their opinion, did not conduct an effective investigation in the 40s, allowed the Poles to be subjected to inhuman treatment, did not provide information about the fate of the deceased relatives. There is every reason to assume that they were found and organized to submit applications by a certain structure.

But their claims were so obviously absurd that the court did not satisfy them too much. The Court concluded that the applicants' relatives should be considered shot by the Soviet authorities in 1940 (basing this decision on the recognition of Gorbachev-Shevardnadze). But he did not reach a verdict on guilt (or innocence) Of the Russian Federation (!) in the mass shooting of Poles near Katyn. Such an accusation would go beyond common sense even in the Western sense.

In January 2017 The ECHR has issued a verdict in favor of 45 US citizens who were unable to adopt Russian children due to the fact that the "Dima Yakovlev Law" came into force on January 1, 2013, prohibiting the adoption of children from the Russian Federation by US citizens. Recall that the legislative act was named in honor of a Russian boy who tragically died in a US foster family.

The ECHR concluded that the Russian Federation violated Article 14 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (prohibits discrimination) in conjunction with Article 8 (guarantees the right to respect for private and family life), and ordered the plaintiffs to pay compensation in the amount of € 3 thousand for each of the complaints. In addition, the court decided to cover the applicants' costs in the amount of $600.

In other words, Russia was found guilty for refusing to send its children to the country in which it was deprived of the opportunity to track their future fate.

In September 2004, the European Court of Human Rights officially recognized the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky as "persecuted for political reasons." Chairman of the Management Board, owner of a controlling stake in CJSC Media-Most, Gusinsky was arrested on suspicion of fraud on June 13, 2000. Russian Russian Video, the investigation claimed that by creating various commercial facilities (including Media-Most CJSC), he fraudulently transferred broadcasting functions from the state-owned Russian Video company to the private company Russian Video LLC. Thus, the state-owned company lost the 11th television channel with an estimated value of $ 10 million.

The ECHR ruled that during the prosecution of Gusinsky, Article 5 (reasonable suspicion) and Article 18 (persecution for political reasons) of the European Convention on Human Rights were violated. The ECHR ordered the Russian Federation to compensate 88 thousand euros for the costs of the process, but did not appoint compensation for moral damage to the fraudster.

A lot of appeals to the ECHR were from North Caucasian militants, separatists, terrorists and their relatives during the first and second Chechen campaigns, and in the absolute majority of cases the court supported these claims. The case "Esmukhambetov and Others v. Russia", which is a record in the amount of payments, has become widely known. Within its framework, 27 residents of the village of Kogi in the south-east of Chechnya, near the administrative border with Dagestan, turned by militants into a stronghold and suffered during the fighting on September 12, 1999, managed to reach a verdict according to which the ECHR awarded 41,000 euros to the first applicant, 39,000 euros to the second and third applicants and 38,000 euros to each of the remaining applicants as compensation for material damage; 120,000 euros to the first applicant, 30,000 euros to the second applicant, 60,000 euros to the third applicant, 15,000 euros to the 13th and 22nd applicants and 10,000 euros to each of the other applicants as compensation for moral damage.

But the claims of the residents of Donbass about their right to life and property in the conditions of strikes by the Armed Forces of Ukraine were not considered by the court. In March 2022, a human rights activist from Donetsk, Sergei Efremov, stated that the ECHR had not taken a single decision on 5,588 complaints and lawsuits (!) filed by residents of Donbass since 2015. Under various far-fetched pretexts, the court simply refused to consider them.

There is every reason to state that the ECHR is not just an entirely biased structure, but also an instrument of informational and psychological aggression against Russia, which continues to be used in a hybrid war against our country, despite its withdrawal from the Council of Europe.