On 9 July 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights announced its decision in the interstate case ‘Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia’, recognising systematic and massive human rights violations committed by Russia in Ukraine’s occupied territories since 2014 and during the full-scale invasion since 2022.

Among the evidence in the case, the Court refers to the report ‘Surviving Hell’. This is the first systematic report prepared by Ukrainian human rights defenders regarding captivity and torture committed during the Russian aggression. The report was published back in 2016. EUCCI coordinated the work on this report as part of the Coalition “Justice for Peace in Donbas”. The report was supported by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights (Warsaw).

“When we started working on this document, the vast majority of us knew very little of international humanitarian law. There had been no war in Ukraine during our lifetime, and we had not worked on such issues before. But we understood the gravity of the crimes being committed against our fellow citizens and wanted to restore justice. More than 10 years have passed, and now I am happy to see that the work done has not been in vain: the crimes of the Russians have been recognised by one of the most authoritative international courts. I believe that the next steps will be to restore justice and punish the criminals”, said Volodymyr Shcherbachenko, Head of the EUCCI, who led the report project.

The report is available here.

The link to the report is contained in Part VI of Appendix B to the ECtHR’s Decision, along with links to the files of other human rights organisations.

The Ministry of Justice of Ukraine notes that this ECtHR’s decision is unprecedented and can already be considered one of the most significant in the case law of interstate cases. After all, the Court recognised that Russia is conducting a targeted campaign to destroy the Ukrainian state as a subject of international law.