The scandals of the European Court of Human Rights, or the conflict of interest fair
A recent report by the ECLJ, the European center for law and justice, reported by Valeurs Actuelles , highlights how much the Human Rights Court of Justice has largely lost its function of protecting human rights and has become a body affected by profound conflicts of interest and easily influenced both by countries where democracy and rights are somewhat set aside, and by NGOs controlled by big capitalists, led by Soros. Let's see some sensational cases, and if you want to sign against these conflicts of interest you can do so on this page.
First part The English patient who, however, was Polish. The case was coldly reported in the British and Polish press with the initials "RS". In November 2020, RS, a Polish national, suffered a heart attack at his home in England. Transferred in a vegetative state to the intensive care unit of a Plymouth hospital, he eventually came out of a coma and was breathing even without artificial ventilation. However, British doctors, deeming that there was no prospect of recovery, decided, in his "best interests", to abandon him to death by stopping hydration.
In Poland, his family struggled to bring their son and brother back to his homeland and provide him with decent care. The Polish government is urging its British counterpart to respect the "right to life" of RS, a practicing Catholic who, according to his family, is firmly against euthanasia. The Polish bishops even announced that they would pay for his repatriation. Nothing has been done. RS's family's application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was rejected . By a cursory and arbitrary signature, RS's fate was sealed and death by dehydration was pronounced. It was the ruling of only one judge, Bulgarian Yonko Grozev , that precipitated this decision. In the end RS's right to live was judged inferior to the right to kill him.
Second Part: the judge who did not want to be expelled. Yonko Grozev is a Bulgarian judge. He co-founded and directed his country's Helsinki Committee for twenty years before becoming leader of the Open Society of New York. After the publication of the first report of the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) by Grégor Puppinck, the Bulgarian Minister of Justice publicly mentioned the possibility of dismissing Yonko Grozev in March 2020, recalling however that the decision rested with the ECHR – which but he didn't.
Since then, the Bulgarian government has sought the recusal of Yonko Grozev, whenever the applicants' lawyer acted on behalf of the famous Helsinki Committee founded by Grozev. Despite the existence of a clear conflict of interest, the ECHR rejected these requests. In this regard it should be noted that the ECHR, which requires national courts to justify their refusal decisions, did not itself justify its refusal to expel Grozev. How come?
Judge Grozev then judged cases defended by the NGO he founded himself, and won them, each time condemning Bulgaria to pay him a few thousand euros in costs . Of course, one can have founded and run an organization for twenty years and then oppose a lawyer working for that organization on a specific case. Everything is possible. The question is not whether or not a given judge was impartial – for that is impossible to prove – but whether the case was decided without the impartiality of the Court being reasonably in doubt. This is obviously not the case when a judge decides a case filed or supported by the NGO he founded, directed or previously collaborated with.
According to the ECLJ's tally, there were 54 such conflicts of interest between 2020 and 2022. Of these, 18 concerned Grand Chamber cases, which is the most important case law of the European Court. This is an even higher number than in previous years, when the European Court of Justice counted 88 cases between 2009 and 2019.
Sometimes Grozhnev has referred decisions about his NGO to another court, but only because the eventual sentence would have been in conflict with one of his previous sentences. Beware that the decisions of the ECHR are not trivial and make jurisprudence and legal precedent in cases such as the right of asylum, sexual rights, conditions of detention, i.e. human rights in the strict sense.
Third part: the curriculum of "Maestro" Pavli. When does a lawyer acquire this qualification? In his curriculum vitae sent to the Council of Europe, as well as in the press and on the website of the ECHR, Darian Pavli declares that he is a senior lawyer, but without specifying which order he was admitted to, nor in which year, contrary to the practice of this highly regulated profession. Upon verification,” notes the ECLJ report, “ the New York Bar Association claims that Mr. Pavli was never admitted to the bar, even though he worked there for the Open Society . The same goes for the other American bar associations that could be interviewed.
As for the Albanian Bar Association, his country of origin, he categorically refused to certify that Pavli was registered in the Bar Association, on the grounds that it would be a matter of private life, "while he agrees to do it in other people's cases,” the report continues, noting that his status as a lawyer is never explicitly mentioned in cases in which he himself claims to have participated in that capacity. In short, at the ECHR no one verifies the curricula that are taken for granted. Furthermore, the desire to place all states on the same level means that a Ukrainian lawyer is placed on the same level as a German judge or a French or Italian professor, but we know that the judicial system is different, the rights are different, the qualifications they are different, just as the ethics and correctness of the various systems are different. Yet all of this is ignored.
Fourth part: Long live Albania . Albania is a textbook case for Open Society Foundations (OSF); it is in this country that it has invested the most (in relation to the number of inhabitants). The reason is simple: it is a small country (3 million inhabitants), poor, unstable, corrupt – and therefore very vulnerable to so-called "influences". One can easily create outsize influence with the fraction of the investment needed for a country like France or Spain.
In Albania, the OSF supported the liberal opposition (composed of many descendants of former communist leaders) against the incumbent conservative president; the OSF is now very close to the Rama government and has largely supported his reform of the judicial system, which also had the effect of allowing the ruling government to "purge" a system of opponents and take control of it. How can we consider at the same level countries with a profound legal tradition such as France, Italy, Holland and countries where the system is easily controlled if it goes well by politics, if it goes badly by someone outside politics itself. Yet for the ECHR they are all the same.
Fifth part: Friends and cousins. Let's go back to the Palvi case. Pavli benefits from close ties to his country's government. The Albanian ECHR judge is Prime Minister Edi Rama's cousin, which leads us to question, at the very least, his independence from the Albanian government. Thus, Pavli judged in the ECHR the appeals contesting a reform of the judicial system that he himself conceived in Albania and which, according to the opposition, strengthens the power of his cousin. Sokol Berberi, an Albanian and substitute (or ad hoc) judge at the CED, a member of the Venice commission which supervises the European constitutions, has close ties to the government, being the brother-in-law of interior minister Fatmir Xhafaj, who later had to resign because he was involved in a scandal related to crime and drug trafficking. After all, his brother Agron Xhafaj is suspected of being an international trafficker.
But there is not only Albania. In Ukraine, Judge Ganna Yudkivska served on the ECHR from 2010 to 2022, while her husband, Georgii Logvynskyi, rose one political position after another: member of the Popular Front of Ukraine party, deputy, adviser to the Minister of Justice and even vice-president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), the body that elects the 46 judges that make up the Court. In 2020, the Ukrainian judge's husband was the subject of an investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU). He is suspected of having embezzled 1.8 million euros through a settlement on a case he himself brought to the ECHR. The investigation is still ongoing, but is hampered by his wife's diplomatic status.
Sixth part: is the Chancellery super partes? Since Poland's Constitutional Court banned eugenic abortion, the country has been targeted by pro-abortion activist networks, who have bombarded the ECHR with these "strategic litigation cases" aimed at forcing it to relax its rules on 'abortion. Dozens of standard applications have been filed by women, some of whom are not even pregnant, who have declared that they fear that they will not be able to have an abortion if, in the event of a future pregnancy, the child should have a disability… An argument provided ex novo by lawyers who work for Federa, the Polish organization for family planning, but also for the Helsinki Foundation, after having been lawyers at the ECHR.
One of these questions is registered under the name of “ML v Poland”. The case has not yet been decided by the ECHR, but it is being watched closely because its decision could single-handedly upend Poland's conservative pro-life policy. "ML", helped by Federa and largely funded by the Open Society Foundations, asked the ECHR to condemn Poland for not being able to abort her child with Down syndrome, "forcing" her to travel to the Netherlands at her own expense. This case, supported by various pro-abortion NGOs, will perhaps be tried by judges belonging to these same organizations. But that's not all, because the case may already be in the hands of lawyers on the ECHR register who are members of these NGOs or who have publicly taken a stand against the ban on eugenic abortion. So much for the right to defense.
The Chancellery, which is a key link in the administration of justice at the ECHR, is also infiltrated by NGOs and their activist networks, who may be able to lend a hand to their former colleagues. Marcin Sczaniecki, for example, is a Polish lawyer on the ECHR register. Before being hired in Strasbourg, he worked for the Helsinki Foundation in Warsaw. As a member of the Registry, he is responsible for drafting case summaries and judgments on the basis of which the judges will decide. Obviously his discretion is enormous.
Seventh part: the Helsinki Committees. Who defends two Pakistanis involved in terrorist activities and subjected to deportation procedure from Romanian territory? A “Helsinki Committee”. Who supports two journalists who were banned by the Hungarian Parliament for making illegal recordings and trespassing in illegal areas? A “Helsinki Committee”. Who claims, in the name of the "best interest of the child", a minor convicted of various crimes, including of a sexual nature, that the best solution is an ad hoc institution? Another “Helsinki Committee”. Who supports a Polish judge who was fired as part of a judicial reform in his country, because its members believe that this undermines the independence of the judiciary? Always a “Helsinki Committee”.
Behind this name, which smacks of the Cold War, are hidden the "committees for the monitoring of respect for human rights", whose name refers to the Helsinki agreements of 1975, with which the West had obtained from the USSR a certain number of guarantees on the safety of individuals and on human rights. “It was a very useful anti-communist structure at the time, but it lost its raison d'être after the fall of the Wall,” explains a lawyer. Once federated in the Helsinki International Federation for Human Rights (the first committee was formed in Moscow in 1976, the second in Czechoslovakia in 1977 and the third in Poland in 1979), they are now organized on a national basis, the Federation having been dissolved in 2007. These committees were taken over by philanthropic bodies, especially Americans, who gave them a new, more trivially "progressive" orientation. Indeed, today they are very active and their members or former members populate the chambers of the ECHR, arguing on one side and judging on the other, always in the same direction: the rights of the individual against any type of rule or norm deemed "conservative" .
Should the ECHR be saved? At a time when the national courts of the main European countries are guaranteed by democracy, indeed they are often the Indian reserve of a theoretical progressive vision far from reality, one might wonder what sense there is in maintaining this institution, especially when there is no impartiality and independence from any influence, above all from that of the rich power groups, is more guaranteed.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles from Economic Scenarios.
The article The scandals of the European Court of Human Rights, or the conflict of interest fair comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/gli-scandali-della-corte-dei-diritti-delluomo-ovvero-il-megafono-di-certe-ong/ on Tue, 25 Apr 2023 08:00:53 +0000.