DISINFO: The Council of Europe is Russophobic and rulings from the Strasbourg Court are anti-Russian
SUMMARY
It is questionable, if Russia really needs membership of the Council of Europe in its present Russophobic form.
The negative attitude of the Russian public towards the European Court of Human Rights is partly explained by its regularly biased, anti-Russian judgments.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Russophobia.
Russia's voting rights in the Council of Europe were suspended after it illegally annexed Crimea. The voting rights have since been restored.
The claim that the European Court of Human Rights adopt anti-Russian rulings is ungrounded. The share of the Court's rulings on Russian-related applications where at least one violation of the European Convention of Human Rights was found by Court is not outstanding, the Court's 2018 Annual report shows. According to it, in 2,365 out of the 2,501 Russian-related cases at least one violation was found, that is in about 95% of cases. For example, the corresponding statistics was 1,273 and 1,434 cases for Romania (89%), 1,274 and 1,304 cases for Ukraine (98%). Hence the corresponding shares for some other CoE member states is around as high as for Russia, sometimes even higher.
Russia leads among other CoE member states in terms of pending cases in the ECtHR with 11,750 cases currently pending, which is a total of 20.9% of the backlog of cases, the same report from the Court shows. It is followed by Romania (8,500 cases) and Ukraine (7,250 cases). However, this figure does not mean anti-Russian bias as it just reflects the large numbers of applications lodged to the ECtHR by the nationals of given CoE member states.
See earlier disinformation cases about the Council of Europe and its bodies.