Strasbourg court closed 879 complaints against Russia. Slovakia has had no judge of its own there for more than a year

On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights published a decision in which it closed 879 individual complaints against Russia at once. From the first reports, it sounds like a surrender, but the court's press release shows something else: this is the remainder of roughly 15,800 such files that the court processed since September 2022, and it still has around 5,700 war-related complaints against Russia open. What is more, the decision had already been adopted on 7 July and was delivered only now.

What the court decided

The decision is titled Lebedeva and Others v. Russia and combines application no. 49120/07 with another 878 files. The seven-judge chamber led by Greek judge Ioannis Ktistakis adopted it unanimously on 7 July 2026 and delivered it on 3 September. It is final and currently exists only in English. European Court of Human Rights ↗

The reasoning has four parts. According to the court, the remaining complaints did not raise questions of fundamental importance for Russia's responsibility, did not require development or clarification of its case law, were not suited by their factual or legal nature to the simplified procedure for repetitive cases, and their individual examination would have required significant additional resources, possibly at the expense of complaints against other states. The court also stated that the decision cannot be understood as retroactively relieving Russia of obligations from the period when it was a party to the convention, and that it does not affect obligations arising from judgments already issued. It retained the possibility of returning a complaint to the list. European Court of Human Rights ↗

Russia was expelled by the Council of Europe on 16 March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine and ceased to be a party to the convention on 16 September 2022. For acts committed before that date, the court still considers it responsible. Moscow, however, does not recognize any of its decisions and refuses to pay the amounts awarded. G4Media ↗ Rzeczpospolita ↗

The number 879 makes sense only with the denominator

This is the part that did not fit into the wire report, and without it the decision sounds different from what it is. Complaints against Russia that were unrelated to the war or to interstate disputes numbered roughly 15,800 at the court in September 2022. It disposed of most of them through the simplified procedure for repetitive cases, and more than sixty cases of fundamental importance, covering more than 600 complaints, were decided by the Grand Chamber or a chamber. Only after this work did those 879 remain. European Court of Human Rights ↗

Among the cases the court decided are precisely the ones the reader would expect first: the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with novichok, the dismantling of his anti-corruption foundation, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the persecution of the family of Chechen opposition activists, the use of facial recognition against a peaceful demonstrator, the foreign agents law, and action against Novaya Gazeta and Google. European Court of Human Rights ↗

And one more thing that the first reports mixed up. The list of topics that agencies attributed to the closed complaints, namely the treatment of opposition politicians and democratic activists or repressive legislation, describes in the press release the entire category of files since 2022, not those 879. The court describes the closed complaints more narrowly as cases concerning the right to a fair trial and protection of property, freedom of expression, detention conditions, immigration, freedom of movement, and protection of personal data. The distinction matters, because the agency version makes it seem as if the court tossed out political cases. It had in fact already ruled on the best-known ones. La Libre ↗

War cases are still ongoing, and there are many more of them

The second category, that is, cases connected with Russian military actions against neighbors and with control of territories outside recognized borders, has not been stopped. The court has recorded about 5,550 individual complaints concerning Crimea, eastern Ukraine, the Sea of Azov, and operations on Ukrainian territory since 24 February 2022, of which it has already communicated about 2,150 to the parties. Another roughly 150 concern the 2008 Georgian conflict. The court registry has set up a special conflict unit for them. European Court of Human Rights ↗

The oldest complaint waited nineteen years

The number of the lead complaint, 49120/07, reveals the year it was filed. Meduza narrows that down to September 2007, so the complainant waited nearly two decades to learn that no one would deal with the case. In the decision, the court admits that the closed complaints may be potentially well-founded. Meduza ↗

Among the closed cases, according to the same source, is also the complaint of Norwegian journalist Thomas Nilsen, whom Russia banned from entering in March 2017 as an alleged threat to national security and whose reasons the Russian Supreme Court refused to explain a year later, as well as the case of opposition politician Lev Shlosberg, who lost his seat in the Pskov regional parliament in 2015. Neither of them is a Russian citizen being prosecuted at home in the sense in which the first headlines wrote about the decision. Meduza ↗

The Russian organization Team Against Torture, which represents such complainants, reacted sharply. "For Russians, this court has always been the last hope for justice, and today that ghostly hope has finally collapsed," it said, adding that the court had denied access to international justice to more than a thousand people and acted discriminatorily. Lawyer Maxim Olenichev called it a serious mistake, legal and reputational, and argues that the court effectively relieved Russia of responsibility for the violations described in those files. Meduza ↗

Slovakia has had no judge of its own in that court for more than a year

While Strasbourg announced that it did not have defensible capacity to finish the last not-quite-nine-hundred files, Slovakia received a message that almost nobody noticed. The chair of the Judicial Council, Marcela Kosová, announced on 2 September a new election to complete the candidates for judge of that same court. The reason is prosaic: Slovakia did submit a trio of candidates, but Branislav Jablonka withdrew his consent to the candidacy, and the list therefore remained incomplete. A new election for one seat will take place on 10 November 2026, with nominations possible until 9 October. SITA ↗ STVR ↗

There is a longer story behind that sentence. Slovak judge Alena Poláčková's mandate expired on 28 December 2024, and she remained in office until 31 August 2025, so the seat has been empty since 1 September 2025. The Judicial Council elected Branislav Jablonka and Ondrej Laciak at its June 2025 meeting and Katarína Roskoványi at its December meeting, and the government approved the trio on 9 January 2026. A hearing before an advisory panel was to follow, and then the election in which the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe chooses one judge from the trio. SITA ↗

The sequence of steps is fixed: without a complete trio, the assembly cannot proceed to the election. So if the Judicial Council elects the third name on 10 November, the whole process will continue sometime in 2027, more than two years after the Slovak seat became vacant. For comparison, the first attempt to assemble the list dates back to September 2024, when the Judicial Council elected a completely different trio of names. Judicial Council of the SR ↗

Limits of this view

The two things are not directly related, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. The empty Slovak seat did not cause the Russian backlog, and one judge would not change the volume of cases against Russia. Moreover, a national judge sits in chambers for cases against his or her own state, so in any case would not take part in deciding Russian complaints. What they do have in common is only that both speak to the capacity of the same institution, once seen from above and once from our side.

Caution is required when it comes to the source base. The Belgian, Romanian, and Polish editions carried essentially the same wire text, so three media outlets do not mean three independent findings, and it was precisely in that copy that the confusion arose between two different lists of topics, which we described above. Of the available sources, only Meduza provides details about the age of the complaints, the specific names, and reactions from Russian lawyers, so in the text they are marked as its findings.

The reasoning on which this text is based comes from the court's own press release, that is, from the institution assessing its own workload and its own decision. The numbers on the scale of the docket are verifiable; the assessment that "we have already said enough" is its own. Critics also have their own stake here, and Team Against Torture represents such complainants, which does not mean they are wrong, only that this should be understood.

And finally, the main point that is easy to misread. This is not the end of Russian cases in Strasbourg. It is the closure of the part of the docket that concerned repression inside Russia and that the court considers to have been resolved in earlier judgments. What remains open is the war, and there are six times more of those files than the closed ones.

What hotinfo is watching