European Court of Human Rights (2004-2005)
In February 2004, a European Court of Human Rights panel decision found for the first
time in its history a breach of Article 14 of the European
Convention on grounds of racial discrimination. The case, Nachova v. Bulgaria, involved the fatal police shooting of two Roma men and a subsequent
investigation which cleared the officers of wrongdoing. The court decision declared that both acts were racially motivated. On request of the
government of Bulgaria, the Grand Chamber of the European Court agreed to review the matter.
Interights, a London-based Human Rights NGO, requested assistance from
Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights in preparing their
amicus submission in seeking Grand Chamber
affirmation of the decision. Advocates prepared a memorandum on standards of proof and burden shifting, comparing the practices in the U.S., Canada,
and South Africa.
Racial Profiling (2004-2005)
Racial
profiling became publicized as a civil and political rights issue in the United States in the 1990s. In Europe, however, the problem of racial
profiling has gotten little public attention. First, this reflects the fact that, until recently, racial discrimination itself was not a pressing
issue in the European social consciousness. The other structural obstacle to addressing racial profiling in Europe has been that the practice of
gathering and maintaining data disaggregated by race or ethnicity is often prohibited by law. This reflects the history of manipulation and misuse
of racial statistics under socialist and communist regimes in many European countries. Today, criminal justice and other government records generally
do not make reference to race or ethnicity. Any effort to gather race statistics for the purpose of documenting discriminatory practices must contend
with these strong data protection laws and cultural norms.
The International Human Rights Clinic and Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights
worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSI) to begin tackling this problem
in six selected European countries (Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Latvia and Spain). The objective was to show that the documentation of racial
profiling by police can be done in conformity with national and regional laws and norms. The overall strategy for the project consisted of policy-focused
research, consultations with law enforcement and civil society officials, designing pilot programs, and legal advocacy.
Ukraine (2004-2005)
In November 2004, thousands of Ukrainians of all ages demonstrated their commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Ukraine today
is a country very unlike the one which emerged after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet it continues to face severe, structural abuses,
particulary in the rural regions of the country. Ukrainian prisoners face shocking torture at the hands of the security forces, who often force
prisoners to confess to crimes they did not commit in order to improve their ratio of solved crimes. In the case of Gremyakin v. Ukraine, a man is
serving a prison sentence, convicted of committing robbery at an address that corresponds with a vacant lot. He has complained of
ill-treatment by the security forces, as well as numerous procedural irregularities, starting with his arrest at work and continuing through to his trial,
which he argued offered no chance to refute the charges against him. The prosecution’s case relied almost exclusively on Gremyakin’s statement confessing
to the crime, which Gremyakin claimed to have signed under extreme duress.
The International Human Rights Clinic and Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights
have partnered with the Kiev-based Ukrainian-American Office for the Protection of Human
Rights to prepare Gremyakin’s case for the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that authorities
illegally detained Mr. Gremyakin, denied him
access to counsel, subjected him to cruel and inhuman treatment while under detention, and denied him a fair and impartial trial. Through this case
and others in conjunction with a parallel advocacy campaign, rights groups hoped to convince the new Ukrainian government to reinforce the safeguards
against torture in the Ukrainian criminal justice system.
Coercive Sterilization Cases:
Access to Medical Files, Right to Fair Trial – Slovakia (2003-2004)
Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights prepared legal memoranda
for two European Roma Rights Center applications to the European
Court of Human Rights that represented
Roma women in Slovakia
who believe they were sterilized without their consent. Some hospitals have refused to allow the women to examine their medical records, even
when they have been accompanied by ERRC lawyers. In the first memorandum, students analyzed whether denial of access to medical information
constitutes a violation of the right to fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on
Human Rights. In the second memo students examined
whether the Slovak government violated Article 8 of the European Convention, which guarantees
respect for private and family life, by failing to
ensure that allegedly sterilized women and their lawyers have access to the women’s medical records.
Residential Segregation of Roma in Education:
Bulgaria (2003-2004)
Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights worked with the
European Roma Rights Center School Desegregation Project on its application to the
European
Court of Human Rights challenging residential segregation of Roma in Bulgaria. The ERRC argued that Roma are placed in substandard schools as a result of their
residential segregation. Students prepared two legal memoranda; the first assessed the Bulgarian state’s responsibility under various international
treaties, while the second collected jurisprudence from the United States, Canada, and South Africa to support the argument that education segregation
due to pre-existing patterns of residential segregation constitutes a rights abuse.
Legal Research – Russia (2003-2004)
Students prepared a research memo to help human rights groups preparing cases coming from Chechnya to establish that the Russian government’s
current policy of opening – but not closing – criminal investigations into human rights abuses fails to comply with the effective remedy requirement
outlined in Article 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Together with the
Chechnya Justice Initiative (a Russian NGO) and the Human Rights
Clinic at the University of Amsterdam, students researched provisions of Russian law regulating victims’ access to their own investigation file and case
materials, focusing on criminal investigations into serious human rights abuses committed during the conflict in Chechnya (disappearances, extrajudicial
executions, unlawful detention, torture and ill-treatment). The group also undertook a comparative law analysis of other European Convention member states’
standards for access and the standards established in other international human rights mechanisms, such as the Inter-American system.