TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
AP1 (Applicant): The court has heard direct eyewitness testimony that civilians and civilian objects were attacked in areas where there was no Georgian military presence.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has also received a substantial body of documentary evidence that corroborates this testimony, as well as satellite footage, video and photographic material, phone intercepts, aviation radar and flight logs, and medical records.
AP1 (Applicant): In addition, the Russian aerial bombardment of civilian targets has been recorded by a range of international observers.
AP1 (Applicant): The overall picture is clear that as well as targeting some military objects, the Russian planes undoubtedly bombed ethnic Georgian villages, hitting people's homes, shops and churches, killing many civilians and injuring many more.
AP1 (Applicant): Initially, Georgian forces remained in position and attempted to defend the population from this invasion.
AP1 (Applicant): However, at 5 a.m. on the morning of 10 August 2008,
AP1 (Applicant): Georgia ordered its forces to withdraw and declared a unilateral ceasefire by diplomatic notice.
AP1 (Applicant): The following day, the 11th, Georgia made its application to this court for interim measures to bring the Russian violations to an end.
AP1 (Applicant): Although the active fighting in and around South Ossetia thus ended relatively quickly, a concerted campaign of making Georgian villages uninhabitable then began.
AP1 (Applicant): This continued for months after the active fighting had come to an end until nearly the entire ethnic Georgian population of South Ossetia had been expelled and their villages destroyed and looted to prevent their return.
AP1 (Applicant): Many of the convention violations alleged in this application were committed well behind Russian lines after hostilities had ended and the Georgian military forces had withdrawn.
AP1 (Applicant): On the 12th of August, the ceasefire agreement brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy was agreed by Georgia.
AP1 (Applicant): It was agreed by Russia the following day.
AP1 (Applicant): However, in flagrant and immediate violation of the terms of this agreement, the Russian military advance into Georgia continued.
AP1 (Applicant): By the 19th of August, it had become clear that Russia did not intend to abide by its undertaking to withdraw to the positions it had held before hostilities began.
AP1 (Applicant): President Medvedev announced that Russian troops would remain in unilaterally declared buffer zones around South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia then announced that it was to establish 37 military posts in undisputed Georgian territory, 18 in areas adjacent to South Ossetia, and 19 in areas adjacent to Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): These military positions extended 20 kilometers south of the South Ossetian occupation line and 40 kilometers to the south and southeast of the Abkhazian occupation line.
AP1 (Applicant): After the intervention and mediation of the EU, Russia eventually withdrew from the so-called buffer zones on the 10th of October, but continued to occupy South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): They remain today in occupation of approximately 20% of Georgia's overall landmass.
AP1 (Applicant): These are clearly not the actions of peacekeepers.
AP1 (Applicant): Before and after the cessation of hostilities, Russian ground troops, acting together with Ossetian forces and other irregular troops operating under effective Russian control, entered ethnic Georgian villages.
AP1 (Applicant): Many of the inhabitants of these villages had by this time fled or been evacuated.
AP1 (Applicant): Those who remained were predominantly elderly or infirm, or either unable or too frightened to uproot themselves.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian ground troops sealed the villages off using entry and exit checkpoints and allowed ethnic Georgian homes and entire villages to be burnt to the ground.
AP1 (Applicant): Individuals were threatened with death if they refused to leave, and there were summary executions of Georgian civilians purely on the grounds of their ethnicity.
AP1 (Applicant): The systematic nature of this deadly campaign led the OSCE to condemn what it described, and I quote, as a disturbing pattern of killings of unarmed civilians.
AP1 (Applicant): A number of the crimes were perpetrated by Russian forces directly.
AP1 (Applicant): Others were committed in the presence of Russian forces who sometimes encouraged or assisted the local militias, or otherwise made no attempt to prevent them.
AP1 (Applicant): There is overwhelming eyewitness and other evidence establishing that Russian ground forces had the authority and ability to prevent the arbitrary execution of ethnic Georgian civilians and the looting and destruction of their homes.
AP1 (Applicant): But far from upholding Russia's obligations as an occupying power to maintain public order and security, its ground forces adopted a calculated policy of facilitating the commission of these crimes, and in some instances, of participating in them directly.
AP1 (Applicant): This conduct was witnessed firsthand by some of those who gave evidence before the court in the evidential hearing, and it's recorded in numerous other sources.
AP1 (Applicant): Witness after witness spoke of having observed Russian troops wearing Russian uniforms, with Russian flags, and speaking with pure Russian accents, overrunning their towns and villages.
AP1 (Applicant): They were able to identify Russian military equipment and Russian flags flying on the tanks and armaments that attacked their villages and killed their families, neighbors, and friends.
AP1 (Applicant): Georgia submits that the Russian military and political campaign involves widespread and systematic violations of Articles 2, 3, 5, and 8 of the Convention, and of Articles 1 and 2 of the First Protocol, and Article 2 of the Fourth Protocol to the Convention, as interpreted and applied in a manner that is consistent with the requirements of international humanitarian law.
AP1 (Applicant): These acts, these crimes, each constitute, we say, individual violations of the Convention.
AP1 (Applicant): But taken together, they amount to an administrative practice that is plainly incompatible with the Convention's requirements.
AP1 (Applicant): The Court's case law has defined an administrative practice as, and I quote, an accumulation of identical or analogous breaches, which are sufficiently numerous and interconnected to amount not merely to isolated incidents, but to a pattern or system, a test, we say, that is more than satisfied on the evidence.
AP1 (Applicant): That is how the Court first described the administrative practice test in Ireland against the United Kingdom in 1978.
AP1 (Applicant): And it is the test that has been consistently applied ever since.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia's rampage through Georgia's territory can't be conveniently split into different incidents or different phases for the purpose of assigning state responsibility.
AP1 (Applicant): It was one campaign.
AP1 (Applicant): On the evidence, it unquestionably amounted to an uninterrupted military campaign, decades in the making, to occupy as much of Georgia as it could get away with.
AP1 (Applicant): In the present case, all of the evidence shows that Russia pursued an administrative practice of gross human rights violations in order to displace forever the ethnic Georgian population of the separatist regions.
AP1 (Applicant): These violations were obviously not isolated, unconnected incidents.
AP1 (Applicant): They amount to a repetitive pattern or system.
AP1 (Applicant): Indeed, that was how, that was the very means by which the underlying Russian military strategy to expel ethnic Georgian civilian population from the area was put into practice through the commission of crimes that would either destroy them or destroy their homes or terrify them into leaving.
AP1 (Applicant): A most revealing piece of evidence before the court comes from Vladimir Putin himself.
AP1 (Applicant): During a news conference in Moscow on the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion, Mr. Putin said this, and I'm going
AP1 (Applicant): to read his exact words to you.
AP1 (Applicant): It's not a secret, the plan was prepared by the general staff.
AP1 (Applicant): Moreover, within the framework of this plan, we carried out the preparation of the South Ossetian militias.
AP1 (Applicant): They have played their part.
AP1 (Applicant): In the evidence submitted by Georgia, you have the video itself that depicts Mr. Putin speaking
AP1 (Applicant): these words with subtitles at annex 44A of our most recent submission, as well as a rough transcript that was introduced in evidence at the oral hearing.
AP1 (Applicant): Just pausing there for a moment in that short statement and analyzing what its significance is for this hearing, we say you have here the best evidence you could hope to receive an unambiguous admission from the president of Russia on the very issue you have to decide.
AP1 (Applicant): By this statement, Mr. Putin admitted two things.
AP1 (Applicant): First, he admitted that the Russian military operation was not a spontaneous reaction to the sporadic engagements of the first week of August.
AP1 (Applicant): Rather, it was planned, he said, well in advance, ready to put into effect when Moscow judged that it had an excuse for its action.
AP1 (Applicant): He said at the end of 2006 or early 2007, it was agreed by the general staff.
AP1 (Applicant): So that explodes the peacekeeping myth altogether.
AP1 (Applicant): The second thing that Mr. Putin admitted
AP1 (Applicant): in that short statement is that Moscow had trained the South Ossetian militia in preparation for what became the August conflict.
AP1 (Applicant): In other words, Russia was, as we have always said, using the secessionist militias as proxy forces to fight alongside the Russian troops and do the dirtiest work.
AP1 (Applicant): Moscow had been engaged in capacity building the very forces that committed the most wicked, shocking, and gruesome of the atrocities proved in the evidence.
AP1 (Applicant): War tactics like that are typically adopted so as to enable a regular army to issue plausible denials of involvement in war crimes.
AP1 (Applicant): But in the present case, Russia doesn't seem to care whether its denials are plausible or not.
AP1 (Applicant): As I will show, so audacious are the lies and distorted confabulations in the Russian case before this court that we seem to have moved from an era of plausible deniability into one of implausible deniability.
AP1 (Applicant): With that overview, may I turn to the substantive submissions.
AP1 (Applicant): And the first question for the court is whether the alleged violations fell within the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, as that term is understood in Article 1 of the Convention.
AP1 (Applicant): Specifically, whether the Russian Federation exercised authority or effective control over the territories where the violations took place at the time the violations took place through their armed forces or a subordinate local administration or in collaboration with the local forces or police.
AP1 (Applicant): According to the court's case law, it is now clear that the violations alleged in the present application, we say, fall squarely within the Article 1 jurisdiction of the Russian Federation under three separate but interrelated and overlapping principles, which apply where a state's acts take effect outside its national territory.
AP1 (Applicant): The first is the principle of state agent authority, which does not depend upon the physical detention of an individual in a building, vehicle, or vessel, but upon the exercise of authority over the individual victim.
AP1 (Applicant): The second is the effective control of an area of territory outside a contracting state's national territory through invasion.
AP1 (Applicant): And the third is the commission of violations by the forces of a subordinate administration, which depends for its existence upon the military, political, and economic support of a contracting state.
AP1 (Applicant): All three principles are in play in the present case.
AP1 (Applicant): They are independent principles of law, each of which is capable on its own of establishing extraterritorial jurisdiction on the facts of this case.
AP1 (Applicant): But in the present case, where all three intersect and overlap, the arguments in favor of Article 1 jurisdiction, at least from the 7th of August onwards, are overwhelming.
AP1 (Applicant): When the principle of state agent authority is invoked, the exact scope of the obligations owed to individual victims depends, in the words of the Al-Skyni judgment, on the concrete situation of the individual vis-a-vis the agents of the respondent state.
AP1 (Applicant): In the context of Russia's military invasion of Georgia, it is self-evident, we say, that the human rights violations proved on the evidence took place whilst the individual victims were under the effective power and control of the forces of the Russian Federation.
AP1 (Applicant): The second head of extraterritorial jurisdiction identified in Al-Skyni arises when, as a consequence of military action, whether it's lawful or unlawful to start with, a contracting state exercises direct and effective control of an area outside its national territory.
AP1 (Applicant): In this case, the areas in which the alleged violations occurred clearly, we say, fell under effective control of Russia at the relevant time.
AP1 (Applicant): By the morning of the 8th of August, Russia had already had military dominance and effective control on the ground of a large part of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and total control of the airspace.
AP1 (Applicant): It's true that Russia consolidated and extended its area of control over the next few days, but the evidence shows that it had already crossed the threshold for effective control of the territory where the violations were committed by at the latest the early hours of the 8th of August.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia's effective control of the de facto regions is evidenced by the deployment of large troop numbers on the ground, many of them already in position before August, the appointment of key political personnel, the construction of military bases in the breakaway regions, the provision of essential budgetary support for the administrations, the conferral of Russian citizenship through a passportization campaign in Georgian territory of Georgian civilians, the application of Russian legislation across the two territories.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian legislation, for heaven's sake.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia was legislating for South Ossetia before this happened.
AP1 (Applicant): The application of Russian legislation and the establishment of electoral constituencies enabling citizens to vote in Russian elections.
AP1 (Applicant): So they're electing, and they did indeed recently contribute to the election of Mr. Putin,
AP1 (Applicant): but had done so prior to the 2008 conflict.
AP1 (Applicant): The United Nations Human Rights Committee, after examining the evidence in detail, concluded as long ago as November 2009, nearly 10 years ago, that at the relevant time, the territory of South Ossetia was under the de facto control of an organized military operation by the Russian Federation, which gave rise, they said, to international responsibility, not only for the actions of its own forces, but also for those of other subordinated armed groups.
AP1 (Applicant): And the Council of Europe's own parliamentary assembly has described the Russian operation as an occupation of a significant part of the territory of Georgia.
AP1 (Applicant): For the Council of Europe, this was and is now a belligerent occupation.
AP1 (Applicant): The parliamentary assembly has also expressed the view that Russia bears full responsibility for violations of the convention in the areas under its de facto control, including for the acts committed at the behest of the de facto authorities in Shkinvali.
AP1 (Applicant): So that is one of the issues you've got to decide.
AP1 (Applicant): You know what the parliamentary branch of this institution has already concluded.
AP1 (Applicant): This proposition, we say, can scarcely be in doubt.
AP1 (Applicant): With 31,000 troops on the ground from the 7th of August, more than 1,200 pieces of armor and heavy artillery, 200 aircraft, 40 helicopters, the control of the territory was effective from the moment of their arrival.
AP1 (Applicant): More than 15,000 Russian troops were moved immediately into South Ossetia, and more than 15,000 were moved into Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): By the 10th of August, when the Georgian forces, I remind you, withdrew altogether, Russian control of the territory had become not merely effective, the test for this court, but absolute.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian troops set up checkpoints at the southern edge of the occupied area of Gori District.
AP1 (Applicant): They established at least six such checkpoints along the southern edge of the so-called buffer zone, well into Georgian territory, well beyond the territory of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, securing and consolidating the area of control that they established long before.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia also reinforced the administrative boundaries of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): We say it's clear from all the evidence not just that Russia secured the external boundaries, but that within the two occupied territories, Russia's armed forces set up military checkpoints at or near almost every occupied Georgian village, overseeing the entry and exit points, and overseeing the looting and destruction that then took place in those villages under their noses during the period after the cessation of hostilities.
AP1 (Applicant): In April 2009, Russian FSB border guards were stationed along the administrative boundaries.
AP1 (Applicant): So by now, by then, nine months later, the FSB is patrolling the boundaries.
AP1 (Applicant): And in June 2011, three years after the cessation of hostilities, the European Parliament noted that Russian troops were still occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has consistently held that it is immaterial whether a state exercises effective control over a territory directly or through the support it provides to a subordinate local administration.
AP1 (Applicant): The history of Russian military and political support for the secessionist aspirations of the de facto authorities is summarized in detail in Georgia's written submissions on the merits at paragraphs 41 to 82.
AP1 (Applicant): Basing itself on that evidence, we submit that the de facto authorities were under the effective control of the Russian Federation many years before 2008, that this control persisted and intensified throughout the conflict, and that it remains in place today in respect of the entire territory of these two areas.
AP1 (Applicant): That control, we say, is demonstrated clearly by Russia's direct involvement in the administrations themselves.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian appointed officials have occupied all of the most senior positions in the de facto government of South Ossetia, including the positions of prime minister, minister of defense, and minister of the interior.
AP1 (Applicant): In each case, these were Russian military service personnel who apparently retained their military status in the Russian armed forces even after coming to Shibvali as the de facto leaders of its so-called independent government.
AP1 (Applicant): Immediately after the 2008 hostilities, there was an intensification of military and financial assistance, as well as open political support expressed through Russia's recognition, the only state in the world to do this, of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.
AP1 (Applicant): As noted, we say, by the International Crisis Group in 2009, Russia continues, in effect, to control South Ossetia politically, financially, and militarily.
AP1 (Applicant): These de facto regimes can readily, must readily, be characterized as subordinate local administrations through which Russia exercised effective control over the territory, over and above the control it exercised through its military presence in the regions.
AP1 (Applicant): In situations of complete dependency such as this, the International Court of Justice has stated that rules of customary international law apply to attribute the acts of the secessionist entity to the state that is supporting it.
AP1 (Applicant): That's customary law.
AP1 (Applicant): In its Bosnia judgment, the International Court of Justice held that persons, groups of persons, or entities may, for the purposes of international responsibility, be equated with state organs if those persons, groups, or entities act in complete dependence on the state of which they are ultimately merely the instrument.
AP1 (Applicant): Any other solution, the ICJ said, would allow states to escape their international responsibility by choosing to act through persons or entities whose supposed independence would, in reality, be purely fictitious.
AP1 (Applicant): It's a perfect description of the facts of the present case.
AP1 (Applicant): And as the Alaska case demonstrates, an almost identical principle is recognized in the jurisprudence of this court.
AP1 (Applicant): In its written pleadings, the Russian Federation has just skated over this critical rule of attribution and misleadingly focused instead on a separate rule which only applies where there is no relationship of dependency.
AP1 (Applicant): And in those circumstances, customary law demands effective control over the operations of the relevant organ of the non-state entity.
AP1 (Applicant): So if there's a relationship of dependency of the sort that we've described, there is no such requirement to show detailed operational control of the operations on the ground.
AP1 (Applicant): But Russia chooses instead to focus on a rule which does not apply on the facts of this case.
AP1 (Applicant): This is not the test laid down to the application of Article I. This court's consistent approach
AP1 (Applicant): has been to hold that once it has been established that a state has effective control through its agents or subordinate authorities, the state owes human rights obligations to all individuals that have thereby come within its jurisdiction, whether or not it is directing the actual individual military operations in which the violations are directly inflicted.
AP1 (Applicant): The level of connection operates structurally at a higher point in the analysis.
AP1 (Applicant): It's the connection between the two entities.
AP1 (Applicant): Indeed, a contracting state thinking this way has a positive obligation under Article I to secure, for example, the right to life of those falling within its jurisdiction and to take operational measures, reasonable operational measures, to protect individuals against the violation of the right to life, even if it is perpetrated by a private individual, just in an ordinary situation.
AP1 (Applicant): That's the dritvehkunde, horizontal effect.
AP1 (Applicant): It's the Osmond case.
AP1 (Applicant): It was first articulated by the Grand Chamber in Osmond.
AP1 (Applicant): But it applies clearly, applies equally to situations where the Article I jurisdiction is extraterritorial.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia had a positive obligation to protect the lives of those citizens within its jurisdiction from homicidal attacks by non-state actors.
AP1 (Applicant): End of.
AP1 (Applicant): Whatever question there may be about the exact extent of a state's positive obligations in this situation, one thing is clear beyond doubt.
AP1 (Applicant): As this court has explained, the particular rule of attribution under public international law, relied on by Mr. Swainston in a misplaced argument,
AP1 (Applicant): the rule that requires detailed operational control, is just not applicable where a subordinate local administration survives by virtue of support from a contracting state.
AP1 (Applicant): Next, it's been submitted by the Russian Federation that in times of international conflict, human rights treaties such as this convention do not apply.