On 3 September 2026 the European Court of Human Rights struck 879 individual applications against Russia out of its list of cases in a single document, without ruling on the merits of any of them. At least 1,534 people had brought them. Nine were mine; I had been working on the oldest since 2013.

I have written elsewhere about whether the Court was right to do this. This piece is about a narrower question, and the one I am actually asked: what changes for a person applying for asylum in the United States, and for the lawyer representing them?

The short answer: one real thing was lost, and the rest of what you use to prove conditions in Russia is untouched.

I. What the Court decided

The decision is Lebedeva and Others v. Russia. Seven judges of the Third Section adopted it unanimously. Nobody wrote separately.

It begins by removing every simple explanation. The Court confirms that it has jurisdiction, because everything complained of happened before Russia ceased to be a party to the Convention on 16 September 2022. It identifies no ground on which the applications would be inadmissible. It describes the complaints as “potentially meritorious.”

The cases were closed under Article 37 § 1 (c) of the Convention, which permits a strike-out where “it is no longer justified to continue the examination of the application.” Four reasons are given: that the most significant Russian cases have already been decided — the ECHR delivered judgments in approximately 14,500 applications against  Russia; that these 879 raise nothing of marked importance for Russia’s responsibility or for the development of the Court’s case-law; that deciding them would consume judicial time at the expense of the forty-six States still in the system; and that Russia has stopped taking part, which the Court says limits what a judgment could practically achieve — a consideration it calls “not decisive” and then weighs.

The appendix to the decision runs to 879 rows and has six columns: number, application number, case name, date lodged, applicants’ names, and the lawyer’s name. There is no column for what any case was about.

II. What it means for applicants   

Two of my nine cases  show what was actually closed.

Sablina and Others v. Russia concerns a nineteen-year-old struck by a car in Moscow in January 2014. Brain death was recorded on the night of 17 January; her organs were removed early the following morning under the presumption of consent established by the Russian transplantation statute of 1992. Nobody told her mother, who found out a month later while reading a forensic report in the criminal case against the driver. The domestic court heard the family’s claim in camera on the hospital’s application, pronounced only the operative part of its judgment, and the judgments were never published in full. The Court communicated the case to the Russian Government in 2016, and the Government filed written observations in September 2017. The case was fully argued. It was never decided.

Popov v. Russia (no. 23908/20 — there are seven applications named Popov v. Russia in the appendix, and this is the one that was mine) concerns a retired Interior Ministry officer who became a member of the Moscow Bar. He had travelled abroad for years.  After retiring he asked the Ministry in writing whether any exit restriction applied to him, and was told in writing, four times in 2017, that it did not. In May 2018 British immigration officers took his passport at Gatwick: the Russian Interpol bureau had listed it in the Interpol database as lost or stolen. It had never left his possession. He then learned that a series of decisions, some of them undated,  restricting his right to leave the country had been issued while he was being told the opposite. The complaint was under Article 2 § 2 of Protocol No. 4 — the right to leave one’s own country. The Government filed observations in March 2021. That case, too, was fully argued and never decided.

I put Popov next to Sablina deliberately. An exit ban is not an abstraction to anyone working in asylum: the ability to leave is the precondition of everything else, and the mechanics of how a person is prevented from leaving — an administrative decision they are not shown, a passport invalidated without notice, a written assurance that turns out to be worthless — are exactly the facts that a protection claim from that country needs established.

III. What it means for the Court

I will keep this short, because I have argued it at length in the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program’s blog and the argument does not need repeating here. But it belongs in a piece written for people who litigate in international forums, because it is not a Russian problem.

Through twenty years of reform — the Wise Persons' Report (2006), the Interlaken (2010), Izmir (2011) and Brighton (2012) declarations, and Protocols Nos. 14 and 15 — the member States were repeatedly asked to give this Court the power to choose which cases deserve its attention and repeatedly declined .Every filter they added was an admissibility rule, applied case by case. The Brighton Declaration calls the right of individual application “a cornerstone of the system.”

The method used on 3 September came from Burmych and Others v. Ukraine (Grand Chamber, 2017), where seven judges dissented jointly, writing that the Convention “requires each application to be given an individual judicial assessment and that no victim is to be regarded by the Court as ‘a burden.’” In Lebedeva nobody dissented. The applicants were not asked to comment before their cases were closed; they learned when the decision arrived.

Whether this becomes a general practice or stays confined to the unprecedented situation of a State that has left the system is, for now, an open question. It is worth watching if any part of your work ends up in Strasbourg. Article 37 § 2 permits the Court to restore a struck-out application to its list if it considers the circumstances justify it, and the door is not formally shut.

IV. What it means for asylum practice in the United States

Now to the part that changes what a practitioner does on Monday.

The loss. A judgment of the European Court in your client’s own case is a document with unusual properties. An independent international tribunal, having heard both sides, records that a specific thing happened to a specific person and holds that it violated a named right. In a protection claim that document does something almost nothing else can: it corroborates the individual episode, not merely the general situation, and it does so in a form that raises no question about where it came from or who produced it. For the applications closed on 3 September, that document will not exist. Among the people who were waiting for one are people who had left Russia and expected to file it in their own status proceedings. One of them is my client. That loss is real and I do not want to soften it.

What did not change. Everything else about proving conditions in Russia. And to see why, it helps to be precise about what a foreign or international judgment is actually doing in an American immigration court.

It is not binding. An immigration judge does not apply the European Convention, and nobody should suggest otherwise. What such a judgment supplies is evidence: an established finding about the conduct of state institutions, made by an independent body after an adversarial procedure in which the respondent State had the opportunity to contradict it, with a date, a case number, and a text anyone can check. That combination of specificity, provenance and adversarial exposure is difficult to obtain from any other kind of source. A press report may be entirely accurate, but its reliability has to be established separately; a judgment carries its own provenance on its face.

And it works by profile, not in the abstract. The question in a protection claim is not “does X happen in Russia” but “what is the likelihood that X happens to a person with this applicant’s characteristics” — which is also the structure of a pattern-or-practice claim under the asylum regulations. A judgment answers the first half. Joining it to the second half — this applicant, these attributes, this exposure — is the work of a country conditions expert report, and it cannot be done by attaching a general country overview and hoping. A general overview can be rebutted  by a single line about how conditions have changed. An individualised analysis is not.

Popov illustrates the fact-type. A claim may turn on whether an exit ban is administered transparently, whether a person can learn that one exists, and whether written assurances from the authorities can be relied on. Those are documentable questions, and the documentation exists — in that instance, in the Court’s own statement of facts and in the Government’s written answer to it.

Which brings me to the point that matters most and is least known: for every one of the 879 applications that had been communicated to the Russian Government, the Court itself wrote and published a statement of facts, and those documents did not disappear on 3 September. They remain on HUDOC (hudoc.echr.coe.int), searchable by application number under the document type “Communicated Cases.” A statement of facts is the Court’s own summary of what the applicant alleged and what the file showed, together with the questions it intended to put to the parties. It is not a finding and must never be described as one. But it names institutions, dates and legal provisions, and it was drafted by an international tribunal with no stake in anyone’s later immigration claim.

Which is also why the missing column in the appendix matters practically rather than only as a criticism. There is no route from the list of 879 names to the substance of any of them. You can retrieve a statement of facts if you already know the case; you cannot discover it. For the applications that were never communicated, there is nothing to find at all. The corpus exists and is largely unindexed — which means, for the time being, it is reachable mainly through the lawyers who hold the files.

V. What remains, and what is still arriving

I want to end where the evidence actually stands, because “Strasbourg closed” has been read by some applicants as “there is nothing left to prove it with,” and that is simply not so.

Judgments in approximately 14,500 applications against Russia already delivered against Russia stand. The decision of 3 September did not disturb one of them and could not have; they remain on HUDOC and they remain evidence.

The Court’s jurisdiction over Russia covers acts and omissions up to 16 September 2022, which is why judgments on events from 2019 to 2022 continued to be delivered long after Russia ceased to be a party — and are still being delivered. Glukhin v. Russia (no. 11519/20), decided in July 2023, is the example I use most often: the Court established that the authorities used facial recognition technology twice, first to identify a person from images published online and then to locate and arrest him in the Moscow underground, called the technology “highly intrusive,” and found violations of Articles 8 (respect for private life) and 10 (freedom of expression). For an applicant whose fear rests on having been photographed at a public event, that is the difference between an assertion and an established fact.

The 3 September decision also did not cover everything. The inter-State cases and the applications arising from armed conflicts sit outside it and continue to be processed.

And the United Nations machinery is untouched by it entirely, because it operates in a separate legal regime that has nothing to do with the Council of Europe. Russia remains a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the treaty bodies continue to produce material. The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation was created only in October 2022 and was extended again in October 2025; it has been reported annually since 2023. The most recent report, presented to the Human Rights Council in 2026 by the Special Rapporteur, Mariana Katzarova, is “Nowhere is safe: exporting the rule of fear beyond borders — transnational repression by the Russian Federation” (A/HRC/63/60).

Newer sources exist that did not exist when these applications were lodged. The European Union Agency for Asylum published its most recent country focus report on the Russian Federation in December 2025.

Count that up honestly and the position is this: one avenue of individualised proof closed for 879 applications, and the general corpus available for proving conditions is larger today than it was four years ago, not smaller. The work of establishing what a returning person faces did not depend on those 879 cases, and it goes on.

That is not a consolation offered to the people whose cases were closed. They are owed a judgment and will not get one. It is a statement about what is still on the table for everyone else — which, for anyone advising an applicant this month, is the operative question.

Finally, a word of thanks.  In 2019, a group of MA students in the University of Arizona Human Rights Practice Program, working in Professor Leonard Hammer’s Strategic Litigation course, took up the organ-removal cases,  Sablina and Others v. Russia. Their work took the form of narrative writing: a reconstruction, built from the case record, of seven days in a Moscow hospital, written for readers who might never open a case file. Their contribution stands whatever the Court did on 3 September. The outcome was never theirs to control. What they could control was the quality of their work, and it was thoughtful and carefully done.

Students in the program who would like to take up research on asylum cases are welcome to contact me through the Human Rights Practice Program. 

Dr. Anton Burkov is the founder of the Strategic Litigation Center (strategiclitigation.center) and a country conditions expert witness on Russia in U.S. immigration and asylum proceedings. He represented the applicants in nine of the 879 applications struck out by the European Court of Human Rights on 3 September 2026, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona (humanrightspractice.arizona.edu/person/anton-burkov). His full analysis of the decision, “Justice Refused,” appears on the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program blog.

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Human Rights Practice Program, the School of Global Studies or the University of Arizona. This article provides general information and is not legal advice