On Wednesday, January 31, the International Court of Justice announced its decision in the case of Ukraine’s claim of Russian financing of terrorism and Russia’s violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The International Court of Justice found that the Russian Federation violated:
the International Convention for the Prevention of the Financing of Terrorism, without conducting an investigation into probable facts of terrorist financing in relation to events in the territory of the eastern regions of Ukraine.
The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, due to the fact that the Russian Federation destroyed education in Crimea and training in the Ukrainian language has been unavailable since 2014.
However, the court found most of the accusations to be unfounded. And besides this, the court did not award compensation, as Ukraine demanded.
As for the part on racial discrimination, the court believes that Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians were persecuted in Crimea not because of their ethnic origin, but for political reasons. Similarly, the court determined Mejlis’s persecution as a political action and not based on the ethnic origin of its leaders, which is why it does not consider that the ban of Mejlis violates the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.
“The Court concludes that Ukraine has not provided convincing evidence that the ban of the Mejlis constitutes an act of discrimination within the meaning of Article 1(1) of the claim brought by Ukraine alleging that the Russian Federation has violated Article 4. The Court is not convinced that, by deciding prohibition of Mejlis, the authorities or institutions of the Russian Federation contributed to or incited racial discrimination”,- said the president of the court, Joan Donoghue.