The wreckage of the crashed Malaysian Boeing 777 in the Donetsk region. File photo STRASBURG, Jan 26 Lisbeth van Heist, coordinator of the operational group for the crash of flight MH17 at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, at a meeting at the ECHR, claims that the passengers of the plane were allegedly under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation at the time of the death, this argument was previously in court has already been rejected by Russia's representative. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg on Wednesday began considering complaints from the Netherlands and Ukraine against Russia in the case of the downing of flight MH17 in Donbass in 2014. The first session deals with the issue of admissibility of the joint applications of the Netherlands and Ukraine against Russia in the case of the crash of the Malaysian Boeing.The Dutch found «valuable witnesses in the Boeing case: the cat has already been killed» The people on board MH17 were under Russian jurisdiction at the time of the crash. We came to this conclusion mainly because Russia exercised effective control over the territory of the DPR, and the plane crashed in this zone,» van Heist said. Earlier, the representative of the Russian Federation to the ECtHR, Mikhail Vinogradov, during the hearings in court, said that the actions in the Donbass , described in the complaints of the Netherlands and Ukraine to the ECHR, do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, since Russia has never controlled the Donbass, and the Dutch authorities themselves have stated that they do not consider what is happening in Ukraine to be an international armed conflict involving the Russian Federation. The concept of «effective control» implies, that if a country controls what is happening on the territory of another country, then it is responsible for this.This principle was applied in relation to the 1996 complaint «Loizidou v. Turkey.» cases relating to events in Northern Cyprus and is not intended to be universal for determining the jurisdiction of the state c.
The claim to the ECtHR about the oppression of believers in Russia is unfounded, Vinogradov saidHe stressed that Russia does not exercise effective control in the Donbass, either directly or through the armed forces, or through subordination of the local administration or its support by the Russian authorities, and the actions described in the complaints of the Netherlands and Ukraine took place outside the territory of the Russian Federation. In this regard, Vinogradov called for rethinking the concept of «effective control» and not applying it in this case. Earlier, Ukraine filed several lawsuits with the ECHR against the Russian Federation, they relate to Crimea and Donbass. Kiev has repeatedly accused Moscow of interfering in the affairs of Ukraine. Russia denies this and calls such accusations unacceptable, emphasizing that it is not a party to the conflict in Donbass. In July 2020, the Strasbourg court officially notified Russia of the complaint filed by the Netherlands against it over the crash of the Malaysian Boeing. The Russian Foreign Ministry regarded the complaint as yet another blow to Russian-Dutch relations. All of these complaints were subsequently merged.The Netherlands called on the ECtHR to reject Russia's objections to the complaint in the MH17 case. In particular, in this complaint, the Russian Federation charges Kiev with the crash of flight MH17 due to the failure of the Ukrainian authorities to close the airspace, according to a press release from the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. The court registered the complaint, but has not yet begun its consideration. The Malaysian Boeing, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on flight MH17, crashed on July 17, 2014 near Donetsk. There were 298 people on board, all of them died. Kiev immediately blamed the militias for the plane crash, but they said that they did not have the means to bring down the plane at such a height. The trial of the MH17 crash began in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020. Four defendants are walking along it — Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko. Pulatov is represented in court by an international group, the rest of the suspects are tried in absentia. Consideration of the case on the merits began on June 8, 2021. Ukraine refused to provide data from its radars, and the United States did not transfer satellite images to the investigation, where, as they claim, the moment of the rocket launch is visible. the party handed over to the Netherlands not only Russian radar data, but also documentation showing that the Buk air defense missile that hit Boeing belonged to Ukraine, and it was launched from territory controlled by Kiev, but the investigators ignored this information. At the same time, on the first day of the court hearing, the prosecution admitted that it had received and was studying the data of the Russian prosecutor's office. RussiaThe investigation was conducted by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) under the leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Netherlands without the participation of Russia. The investigation claims that the Boeing was shot down from the Buk anti-aircraft missile system, which belonged to the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade of the Russian Armed Forces from Kursk, from the territory controlled by the militia. The line of state prosecution is based on the testimony of exclusively anonymous witnesses. The defense of the Russian defendant Pulatov, accused in the case, stated that this makes it difficult to assess the reliability of their testimony, but the Dutch prosecutor's office insists that anonymity is necessary for security reasons. is biased and one-sided. According to the head of the department, Sergei Lavrov, it is full of double standards.
