Today, January 31, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will announce a decision in the case that Ukraine filed back in January 2017 against Russia.
Let us recall that on January 16, 2017, Ukraine began a case against the Russian Federation in the International Court of Justice. Kyiv accuses Moscow of numerous and systematic violations of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In particular, this case states that the Russian Federation discriminated against Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, banned the activities of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, as well as disappearances, murders and illegal searches and detentions in the temporarily occupied Crimea.
In April 2017, the International Court of Justice decided to apply temporary measures against the actions of the Russian Federation in occupied Crimea. Thus, the UN Court in the Hague ordered the Russian Federation to ensure the work of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, but the Russian Federation does not comply with this decision.
During all this time, the team of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center collaborated with lawyers on this case, collected evidence of racial discrimination in Crimea, and also, together with authoritative international organizations and institutions, fought this illegal decision of the occupiers to ban the Mejlis, as well as the violation of human rights on the peninsula .
For its part, the CTRC regularly sends reports and reports to the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of association, the CoE Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights, in which it indicates on the illegality of the decision to ban Mejlis and Russia’s failure to comply with the interim decision of the international court, as well as on systemic violations of people’s rights in occupied Crimea.
In addition, representatives of the organization systematically speak about the illegal ban of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people and other crimes of the Russian Federation in the occupied territories in many speeches at various international platforms.
At the Ukrainian level, they took an active part in the preparation of regulatory legal acts of the Cabinet of Ministers to consolidate the legal status of the representative body of the indigenous people and consultations with them. Lawyers of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center assisted in the preparation of documents of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people to complete the procedure for securing the legal status as a representative body of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people, which, after all approvals, have been in the CMU from October 6, 2023 to the present.
So, very soon we will learn about what decision the International Court of Justice made on Russia’s violations and we hope that by consolidating the legal status of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people in the near future, the Cabinet of Ministers will demonstrate that there is no discrimination in Ukraine.