On 16 February, the Committee of Ministers ended the supervision of the execution of the ECHR judgments in the Bochan (No. 2) v. Ukraine group of cases. The cases concerned violations of the right to a fair trial during review proceedings before the Supreme Court following judgments of the European Court. In the second judgments it gave on each case, the European Court found that the initial violations had not been remedied during the reopened domestic proceedings, causing new violations of the right to a fair trial.
Since the facts of the cases, the Ukrainian Supreme Court’s case-law has evolved in a Convention-compliant manner. Its practice in the cases where the European Court finds a violation and there is a question of review proceedings aimed at achieving restitutio in integrum is now clear and well-established.
To this end, the authorities undertook a range of capacity-building and awareness-raising measures, including broad dissemination of the European Court’s judgments. Furthermore, the project of the Council of Europe “Further support for the execution by Ukraine of judgments in respect of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights” funded by the Human Rights Trust Fund and implemented by the Justice and Legal Co-operation Department in 2019 – 2021, carried out many activities aimed at preventing similar violations.
