UN Human Rights Committee’s groundbreaking decision has implications for all occupying forces

In February 2014, the Russian Federation invaded Crimea, part of Ukraine. On 18 March, it annexed the peninsular, imposing Russian law. Ukrainians were given one month to complete a complex process if they wished to refuse Russian citizenship. Prisoners weren’t given the option to refuse.

The case

In 2017, we brought a case before the UN Human Rights Committee, with our Ukrainian partner lawyers Serghiy Zayets and Natalia Ryzhenko, and Roman Martynovsky of the Ukrainian NGO Regional Centre for Human Rights (RCHR). The case was brought on behalf of three Ukrainian complainants, all of whom were in detention at the time.

The three complainants had been charged and/or convicted under Ukrainian law. Two had seen their convictions ‘reclassified’ under Russian criminal law. The third had his charge swapped to an ‘analogous’ Russian charge. All were subsequently transferred to detention facilities in Russia, where they remained despite requesting to be transferred back to Ukraine.

The judgment

In March 2024, the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) found that:

• the imposition of Russian law in Crimea, to apply retroactively, was unlawful, and resulted in the arbitrary detention of the three complainants
• the Russian Federation’s forced naturalisation program violated the complainants’ civil and political rights
• the complainants were subject to discrimination in respect of the imposition of Russian citizenship and their subsequent transfer to prisons within Russia.

The HRC called on Russia to ‘take steps to avoid similar violations in the future, including reviewing its legislation on citizenship and retroactive application of criminal law’ as it is applied to Crimea.

What this litigation achieved

This was the first decision from an international human rights body to address individual claims of human rights violations resulting from Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. It was groundbreaking in four ways. It was:

• the first time the HRC had interpreted and applied the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) with reference to international humanitarian law (IHL)
• the first time it had found that the ICCPR protects against the forced imposition of foreign citizenship
• the first international decision finding forced naturalisation discriminatory on grounds of national origin
• the first time an international human rights tribunal has found discrimination on the grounds of ‘protected persons’ status under Geneva Convention IV

‘This decision is utterly ground-breaking in its recognition of the abusiveness of the strategy of forced naturalisation not only as a violation of the Convention, but constituting racial discrimination on the basis of national origin. No other international body has made such a far reaching finding with respect to the regime in Crimea.’

Serghiy Zayets, lawyer.

In a legal first, the HRC interpreted and applied the ICCPR in light of international humanitarian law (IHL), and underlined that the Covenant and IHL are ‘complementary, not mutually exclusive’. This interpretation and application of the ICCPR is far reaching.