The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), seized in urgent procedure, asked Moscow on Thursday not to execute two British soldiers sentenced to death by the pro-Russian separatist authorities for having fought with the Ukrainian army in Mariupol .
The ECHR had already sent Moscow the same request for a Moroccan soldier on June 16.
According to the Russian authorities, the three men, the Moroccan Brahim Saadoun and the two Britons had surrendered and had been taken prisoner in the region of Mariupol in the company of around a thousand Ukrainian soldiers in mid-April.
They had been sentenced to death on June 9 by the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
The request made on Thursday by the ECHR, the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, concerns two British citizens, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, born in 1973 and 1994 respectively, who are married or in a relationship with Ukrainian citizens and “consider the Ukraine as their home”.
They joined the Ukrainian army in 2018 and were deployed to the Mariupol region at the start of the conflict this winter.
The ECHR “directed in particular to the government of the Russian Federation, according to the rules of Article 39 of the Court, to ensure that the death sentence pronounced against the applicants is not carried out, to ensure that their conditions of detention are appropriate, and to provide them with any necessary medical assistance, ”says the Court, based in Strasbourg.
Article 39 of the rules of the ECHR allows it to order “provisional measures” when the applicants are exposed to “a real risk of irreparable damage”.
The ECHR insists that Russia is still bound by its decisions, even though Moscow was expelled from the Council of Europe in mid-March.
And she asks the Kremlin to provide her “within two weeks, information showing what actions and measures have been taken” by the Russian authorities to ensure respect for the rights of the European Convention on Human Rights of Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin.
The demands of the ECHR could however find little echo with Moscow since the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, adopted several amendments at the beginning of June which lead Russia to no longer apply the decisions of the ECHR rendered after March 15. .