TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
AP1 (Applicant): First, that a state's jurisdiction under Article I can be triggered in one of two ways, either by the acts of its organs and agents abroad or by its exercise of effective control, or in the words of the Grand Chamber in Alashku, at the very least, decisive influence over an area outside its territory.
AP1 (Applicant): Second, as this court has consistently held, it is immaterial whether a state exercises this effective control directly or through a subordinate local administration.
AP1 (Applicant): Third, determining whether there is effective control over an area is a question of fact.
AP1 (Applicant): It falls to be established through an assessment of the military, political, and economic control or influence exercised over the territory.
AP1 (Applicant): Fourth, where states have such effective control of an area, they are obliged to secure the full range of rights.
AP1 (Applicant): The Grand Chamber in Al-Skhini, reflecting earlier jurisprudence, made this quite clear when it stated, and I quote from paragraph 140 of that decision, the controlling state has the responsibility under Article I to secure within the area under its control the entire range of substantive rights set out in the convention and those additional protocols which it has ratified.
AP1 (Applicant): It will be liable for any violation of those rights.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation, in its written submissions, asks this court to set aside its carefully considered and well-developed jurisprudence on extraterritorial jurisdiction.
AP1 (Applicant): But since the court's decision in Lwazidu, it has developed a consistent approach that arises in circumstances similar to the one before the court today based on sound principles of law.
AP1 (Applicant): The northern Cyprus cases, Ilashku, and now Ivantok, all provide firm guidance to this court on the appropriate legal principles to apply in its consideration of this case.
AP1 (Applicant): Turning to the application of those principles to the facts of the present case, the incidents the subject matter of these proceedings took place primarily between 2002 and 2004, with the majority of incidents occurring in 2004, the same year as the Ilashku decision was delivered.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has, therefore, already examined in detail the factual circumstances giving rise to its finding that the Russian Federation had jurisdiction over the territory of Transnistria.
AP1 (Applicant): It examined a military, political, and economic support provided by the Russian Federation and found that the MRT was established and continued to survive as a result of this support.
AP1 (Applicant): In Ivantok, the former fourth chamber made a similar finding.
AP1 (Applicant): It held that since 2004, and at least up until June 2007, the Russian Federation continued to provide military, economic, and political support to the MRT.
AP1 (Applicant): There is, therefore, a clear line of authority from this court establishing as fact that from the establishment of the MRT administration in 1991 until at least June 2007, the Russian Federation had jurisdiction over the territory of Transnistria.
AP1 (Applicant): The facts underlying this application occurred during this period.
AP1 (Applicant): We submit that these findings are applicable to the facts of this case and that there is no good reason to depart from them.
AP1 (Applicant): Notwithstanding this, the court has raised a number of questions concerning the Russian Federation's military, economic, and political influence over the MRT.
AP1 (Applicant): While these have been fully addressed in the applicant's written observations, I would like to briefly highlight just some of the facts that indicate the extent of that influence.
AP1 (Applicant): On the question of military support, despite its commitment to withdraw all of its troops at the 1999 OSCE Istanbul Summit, the Russian Federation continues to have a significant armed presence in Transnistria and continues to maintain a stockpile of weapons on the territory.
AP1 (Applicant): Indeed, there is no longer even any public commitment to withdrawal of troops from the territory.
AP1 (Applicant): This is borne out by the 2009 agreement between the Russian Federation, Moldova, and the MRT that Russian troops would be replaced by an OSCE peacekeeping mission, but only once a political settlement had been reached.
AP1 (Applicant): Even if the military presence has reduced to some extent, the fact that it remains alongside the weapons stockpile has what the Alaskan judgment described as a dissuasive influence in the region.
AP1 (Applicant): It represents the specter of Russia exercising its control in a more overt fashion in the future, consistent with the true purpose of its military presence in Transnistria, which is not, as is suggested in its written submissions, to carry out peacekeeping duties and guard armaments, but rather to maintain control over the territory, to retain the capacity to react to events, and to consolidate the position of the MRT in Transnistria.
AP1 (Applicant): As regards political influence, the Russian Federation dismisses the court's detailed findings of fact in Alasku on its role in the establishment of the MRT administration.
AP1 (Applicant): While we would refer the court to those findings, we would also like to highlight some recent examples of political influence that illustrate the role Russia continues to play in the life of that administration.
AP1 (Applicant): Thousands of Russian passports have been granted to citizens of Transnistria since 1992, including over 70,000 since 2006.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian parliament, for its part, describes Transnistria as a zone of special strategic interest, while statements by the Duma have been openly supportive of independence, with the former speaker of the Duma going so far as to describe Transnistria as an outpost of Russia.
AP1 (Applicant): While the Russian Federation asserts that it has provided no economic support, the court in Alasku found that economic support provided to the MRT was essential to its continued existence.
AP1 (Applicant): The court noted the supply of gas to the MRT on favorable terms at paragraph 156 of the Alasku judgment.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation denies it has any involvement in facilitating the supply of cheap energy and characterizes the activity of Gazprom, the main supplier of energy in the territory, as that of a public corporation engaged in complex commercial transactions in difficult circumstances.
AP1 (Applicant): But Gazprom is not independent of the state.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation is the majority shareholder in Gazprom.
AP1 (Applicant): Furthermore, the MRT administration owes over $2 billion to the Russian Federation for the supply of energy, but that debt is regarded as owed by the Moldovan government.
AP1 (Applicant): No attempt has been made by the Russian state to recover that debt from the MRT administration.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation also provides large sums of money to fund business and even pay pensions to the Transnistrian residents.
AP1 (Applicant): They characterize this classic exercise of state authority as humanitarian aid.
AP1 (Applicant): Whatever you want to call it, its effect in terms of Russian economic control is clear.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has asked about a resolution in the Duma in February 2005 requesting the introduction of sanctions against Moldova with the exclusion of the region of Transnistria.
AP1 (Applicant): Although the government seeks to dismiss the significance of this, the Duma took it seriously enough to follow up that resolution with a further resolution just one month later, inquiring as to the measures taken on foot of the original resolution.
AP1 (Applicant): As we note in our written submissions, economic sanctions were introduced by the Russian Federation shortly after that, according to a report from the IMF, had serious consequences for the Moldovan economy.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation's involvement in and influence over the MRT administration is incompatible with its assertion that it is an honest broker, an assertion that is completely at odds with its historical involvement in the territory.
AP1 (Applicant): We would ask the court to consider why the Russian ambassador to Moldova attends 20th anniversary festivities purporting to celebrate Transnistrian independence, why that same ambassador insists the presence of Russian troops in Transnistria is in Russia's best interests, why Russia continues to provide passports to individuals resident in Transnistria, and why so many Russian nationals are members of the MRT administration.
AP1 (Applicant): The MRT administration enjoys extensive military, economic, and political support, such that it survives by virtue of that support.
AP1 (Applicant): We submit the threshold for jurisdiction is more than convincingly met in this case.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian responsibility in this case, in our submission, flows from the relationship of dependence and control it has generated with the MRT.
AP1 (Applicant): Where the state has effective control of an area through a subordinate administration, the court has emphasized, most recently in paragraph 138 of the Al-Skhini judgment, and I quote, that it is not necessary to determine whether the contracting state exercises detailed control over the policies and actions of the subordinate local administration.
AP1 (Applicant): Rather, as the court went on to make quite clear, and again I quote from that judgment, Responsibility flows also from its failure to take measures to protect the rights of people in an area under its effective control.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has asked about the positive obligations of Russia to ensure respect for the applicant's rights.
AP1 (Applicant): This court's consistent approach has been to hold that once it is established a state has effective control, that state owes human rights obligations to individuals that come within its jurisdiction.
AP1 (Applicant): The contracting state with effective control must take necessary, appropriate, and feasible measures to protect the individuals from such violations, even where they are committed by private individuals with whom the state has no formal relationship.
AP1 (Applicant): That duty does not impose an absolute obligation of result, but it does impose a due diligence obligation to do all within the state's power to prevent violations from taking place.
AP1 (Applicant): In the present case, the court should ask itself, what has the Russian Federation done to prevent the violations complained of?
AP1 (Applicant): It is beyond doubt that Russia knew what was happening and how the applicant's rights were being violated.
AP1 (Applicant): It is demonstrably the case, in light of its extensive control and influence, that there were steps reasonably available to the Russian Federation to prevent those violations.
AP1 (Applicant): However, it has failed to take any meaningful measures to protect the applicants.
AP1 (Applicant): I will now turn to the question of Moldova's jurisdiction.
AP1 (Applicant): Transnistria is part of the territory of the Republic of Moldova, and Moldova is responsible for securing to everyone within its jurisdiction the rights and freedoms set out in the convention.
AP1 (Applicant): We acknowledge in our written submissions, and repeat again today, that Moldova does not exercise control over the territory of Transnistria.
AP1 (Applicant): It is perhaps tried to note that aspects of its sovereign functions are curtailed, that the options at its disposal are more limited.
AP1 (Applicant): However, that does not absolve it of its obligations towards individuals within its national territory.
AP1 (Applicant): We are not advocating for the application of a novel, strict responsibility standard, but of the well-established obligation to take all possible and feasible measures to restore the rule of law generally and to prevent and respond to violations specifically.
AP1 (Applicant): Moldova had at its disposal considerable means to affect the circumstances of the applicants in this case, including taking diplomatic, economic, judicial, and other measures.
AP1 (Applicant): It is not enough to simply rely on the monitoring and documenting of serious human rights violations in order to ensure the right to return to the country.
AP1 (Applicant): The Moldovan government could also have sought to bring the criminal law to bear on those responsible for crimes committed in the course of, and associated with, the violations of the applicant's rights.
AP1 (Applicant): Where the Moldovan government failed to take measures reasonably available to it, it is, we submit, in breach of its positive obligations to secure the applicant's rights.
AP1 (Applicant): The Court has repeatedly affirmed that it must have regard to the Convention's special character as a human rights treaty, and that its provisions must be interpreted and applied so as to be practical and effective.
AP1 (Applicant): The applicants in this case are entitled to the protection afforded by the Convention, notwithstanding the establishment of the self-proclaimed MRT administration.
AP1 (Applicant): Indeed, it is precisely in situations that threaten the rule of law and democratic principles underpinning the Convention that such protection is most important.
AP1 (Applicant): The Court has urged to ensure that there is, to use the Court's own phrase in the Cyprus versus Turkey case from 2001, no regrettable vacuum in the system of human rights protection.
AP1 (Applicant): The applicants ask the courts to find they come within the Article I jurisdiction of both respondent states in respect of violations on which my colleague, Mr. Plastika,
AP1 (Applicant): will now address the Court.
Nicolas Bratza (JudgeP): Thank you very much, Mr. Hughes.
Nicolas Bratza (JudgeP): Thank you, Mr. Postică.
AP2 (Applicant): Mr. President, I would like to begin by illustrating to the
AP2 (Applicant): court how some of the applicants were affected by the action of the MRT by highlighting their experiences from the witness statements.
AP2 (Applicant): On the way home, we were stopped at random by the Transnistria militia, who searched forcefully our bags.
AP2 (Applicant): When these men found books written in Latin script, they tore them apart and told us to go to study to the Russian schools instead.
AP2 (Applicant): I would like to quote from the state of Christina Bulgak, one of the child applicants in this case.
AP2 (Applicant): When the school year had to start, we were unable to go to school.
AP2 (Applicant): We had to stay alone at home almost like in a home arrest when our parents had to go to work.
AP2 (Applicant): We couldn't even play in the yard with the other children because they pretended not to understand us and would call us homeless, or Romanians, says Alisa Safonova.
AP2 (Applicant): We were dismissed from their jobs only because their children studied at a Romanian language school, says Diana Gas.
AP2 (Applicant): This is a brief sample of what the applicants have endured at the hand of MRT.
AP2 (Applicant): This case is not about a forgotten conflict in an obscure region of the world.
AP2 (Applicant): These events took place mainly between 2002 and 2004 and continue happening right up to the present day in an otherwise peaceful southeastern European country, a member of Council of Europe.
AP2 (Applicant): The breakaway administration of the Transnistria region in the Republic of Moldova punishes in these ways the applicants, children, parents, and teachers.
AP2 (Applicant): Their only crime is the desire to speak freely and study in their native language, the official language of their state, and to provide a meaningful education for their children.
AP2 (Applicant): It is even more troubling, honorable judges, to see this anomaly raised to the rank of an official regulation of this breakaway region, which in itself is a contradiction in terms.
AP2 (Applicant): Nevertheless, the MRT have introduced a so-called law on languages that requires anyone who wants to avoid criminal prosecution to use a Cyrillic script when writing in Romanian.
AP2 (Applicant): Thus, in a bitter irony, an illegal administration forces ordinary law-abiding citizens into a situation of illegality.
AP2 (Applicant): They have an impossible choice between educating in this linguistic anomaly or breaking the law and living under the constant threat of criminal prosecution.
AP2 (Applicant): This abnormal regulation is an MRT administration patented invention.
AP2 (Applicant): Nowhere else in the world has such an anomaly been introduced, but it serves to graphically illustrate the goals of the MRT.
AP2 (Applicant): They include further isolating Transnistria from the rest of Moldova and the ethnic Moldovans from full participation in public life in Transnistria.
AP2 (Applicant): Mr. President, the breakaway administration of the
AP2 (Applicant): unrecognized Moldovan separatist region of the Transnistria have systematically infringed the applicants' fundamental rights.
AP2 (Applicant): The applicants' right to private life, education, and freedom from discrimination have been violated on a regular basis.
AP2 (Applicant): I will deal with this violation in turn.
AP2 (Applicant): With respect to Article 8, the right to private life is undoubtedly central to a normal life of a modern person, and language is undoubtedly central to exercising meaningfully this right to private life.
AP2 (Applicant): It is clear to everybody that one's mother tongue should be spoken and written in the script in which it was designed.
AP2 (Applicant): Not only is it unnatural to write in Russian with French characters, or in English using Cyrillic script.
AP2 (Applicant): Forcing Romanian speakers to use this anomaly grossly violates their right to live a normal life.
AP2 (Applicant): Language is clearly linked to ethnic identity and to relation with others, all of which are protected by Article 8.
AP2 (Applicant): This Court, in the case of Cibotaro v. Moldova, has held
AP2 (Applicant): that refusing to recognize one's identity can amount to an interference with private life.
AP2 (Applicant): In this case, prohibiting pupil applicants from studying in the script of their own language, an essential aspect of their linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identity, is in direct interference with the right under Article 8.
AP2 (Applicant): Moreover, the harassment, intimidation, and insults suffered by the pupils for attending the schools of their choice, where teaching took place using the Latin script, and of parents for trying to ensure that their children are educated according to their cultural and linguistic traditions, also amounts to a serious interference with their private life.
AP2 (Applicant): The targeted closure of the Moldovan schools by the MRT and continued harassment for teaching the Romanian language with the Latin script has interfered also with the private life of the applicant's teachers.
AP2 (Applicant): It has had a detrimental impact both on their ability to freely pursue their profession without arbitrary interference, protected under Article 8 on their own cultural and linguistic identity.
AP2 (Applicant): Living under the constant threat of prosecution constitutes further interference with the right to private life, as the Court has recognized in the case of Norris v. Arlan.
AP2 (Applicant): Honorable Court, the applicants submit that the various interferences with their rights are neither in accordance with the law nor necessary in a democratic society as required by Paragraph 2 of Article 8 of the Convention.
AP2 (Applicant): The acts committed against the applicants described in the application form and in the statement and access to the case have no basis in either Moldova or Russian law.
AP2 (Applicant): Neither of the governments has ever offered a possible justification for the interferences, and there can be none.
AP2 (Applicant): Mr. President, members of the Court,
AP2 (Applicant): to further support the applicants' claims, allow me to remind the Honorable Court that the MRT did not stop at violating the applicants' present private life.
AP2 (Applicant): They purposefully attempted to jeopardize the applicant's future.
AP2 (Applicant): The administration attacked their rights to education.
AP2 (Applicant): A primary aim of education is to enable children to maximize the child's ability and opportunity to participate fully in society.
AP2 (Applicant): Conversely, education which fails to achieve these aims can hinder a child's access to opportunities both within the education field and in the future.
AP2 (Applicant): Studying in an artificial language, Romanian written in Cyrillic, a language that doesn't exist outside of Transnistria, means the end of education after school years.
AP2 (Applicant): Nowhere in the world can the pupil go on to study on university with the language anomaly that the MRT forces upon them.
AP2 (Applicant): The facts of this case also involve other direct interferences with the right to education.
AP2 (Applicant): For example, school closure, the besieging and storming of premises by the militia, the arrest and detention of teachers, the cutting off of basic utilities and food supplies, seizure and destruction of Latin script materials, repeated acts of vandalism, harassment, intimidation, and verbal abuse against the applicants.
AP2 (Applicant): Such acts are the antithesis of the sort of environment in which the goals of effective education might be realized.
AP2 (Applicant): The deliberate interferences by the MRT administration also include thwarting access of pupils of all three schools to adequate facilities, forcing the pupils and teachers to use substandard premises and restricting physical access to their existing schools, thereby forcing pupils in some cases to travel up to 70 kilometers per day.
AP2 (Applicant): Such distances imposed artificially in a region without proper roads and public transportation mean for some pupils being unable to attend classes, being late for classes, being unable to take part in extracurricular activities, burdening them with unaffordable expenses, and overall resulting in a wholly inadequate standard of education.
AP2 (Applicant): Honorable judges, I will turn to consider the violation of the right to equality under Article 14.
AP2 (Applicant): The policy implemented by MRT targeted the applicants because of their ethnicity and language and was plainly discriminatory.
AP2 (Applicant): As explained, the education imposed on the applicants was as useless education in no functional language at all.
AP2 (Applicant): For those who insisted on education in the latent script, they were eventually subjected to intolerable conditions in inadequate premises with onerous travel requirements and timetables.
AP2 (Applicant): This imposed great burdens and pressure, forcing many to renounce this path or leave.
AP2 (Applicant): This is in stark contrast to the position of pupil-speaking Russian and Ukrainian in Transnistria, who received up-to-date modern materials used in other countries such as Russia and Ukraine.
AP2 (Applicant): Indeed, as the Russian government recognized, the Russian authorities supplied the Russian schools with the needed materials for study.
AP2 (Applicant): The applicants were placed at a severe disadvantage in comparison to their Russian and Ukrainian-speaking pairs, who had access to superior education and superior instruction facilities, superior books and resources.
AP2 (Applicant): So the discrimination against Romanian speakers in providing proper education amounts to a gross violation of Article 14 of the Convention taken with Article 8 and Article 2 of the Protocol 1.
AP2 (Applicant): Honorable Court, the resolution of the case in favor of the applicants remains important today.
AP2 (Applicant): Violation at the heart of this case dates back to 2002 and 2004, but violation also continues to the present day.
AP2 (Applicant): The applicants submit that it would be a grave injustice not to find violation of the applicants' rights.