Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky:
“The complaint of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office to the ECHR against the actions of the Ukrainian authorities has more than weighty grounds and will become a“ litmus test ”of the impartiality of the Strasbourg court.
In May 2014, a monstrous crime was committed in Odessa, more than 40 people were killed. For the seventh year now, peaceful areas of Donbass have been living under incessant shelling from the Ukrainian military. Meanwhile, the country’s authorities continue to attack the Russian language, violate the rights of national minorities, introduce laws on “indigenous peoples”, and close opposition channels. The evidence base is huge and lies, as they say, on the surface.
The judges of the ECHR will have to take into consideration the appeal of the GP and make a decision on how the murders in Donbass, as well as the laws on the language and indigenous peoples of Ukraine, relate to the European Convention on Human Rights. This is where all their qualifications come in! These are not same-sex marriages, it is about the right to a peaceful life, about the right to speak their native language.
Let me remind you that the General Prosecutor’s Office, in turn, applied its powers under the law adopted by the State Duma at the end of the last session, which allowed it to represent the interests of Russia in international and foreign organizations, courts, including the European Court of Human Rights. From a legal point of view, we have complied with all the norms. “
