Политически мотивированные дела

In recent years, we have seen a sharp rise in the criminal prosecution of dissidents across our target region. As part of its increasingly authoritarian policies, the Azerbaijani authorities have used their criminal justice system to imprison leading human rights defenders, activists and journalists to punish them for their work. In Georgia and Russia, political opposition members have been detained arbitrarily and had their fundamental rights violated during detention.

We have successfully secured a number of ground-breaking judgments from the European Court of Human Rights establishing the politically-motivated nature of these cases and securing justice for victims. Such judgments, finding a rare violation of Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights, not only determine the presence of political motivation in the authorities’ actions but also laid the groundwork for the Court’s newly developed standards across the Council of Europe region.