ECHR to Hear Journalist’s Testimony on the Abduction of Ukrainian Children in Occupied Crimea

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has scheduled an oral hearing in a case concerning ten Ukrainian children whom Russia failed to return to Ukraine following its occupation of Crimea in 2014. The hearing on the admissibility and merits of the application will take place on 22 September 2026. Human Rights Centre ZMINA and the Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) have joined the proceedings as third-party interveners. Their analysis of Russia’s systematic policies of passportisation, indoctrination, militarisation and the transfer of Ukrainian children was supported by testimony from journalist and PIJL director Nataliya Gumenyuk, who visited occupied Crimea six times between 2014 and 2020.

Application no. 6719/23 was lodged on behalf of the children by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union (UHHRU). According to the organisation, all ten children were between one and five years old at the time of the occupation of Crimea and were in state care in children’s institutions.

After establishing control over the peninsula, the Russian occupation authorities refused to return the children to Ukraine and failed to disclose their whereabouts. Their profiles later appeared on a Russian adoption website.

Human rights defenders believe that some of the children may have been adopted, as information about them subsequently disappeared from the platform. Following the occupation of Crimea, Russia unilaterally declared more than 4,000 Ukrainian children deprived of parental care and living on the peninsula to be Russian citizens.

The case concerns possible violations of several provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, including the right to respect for private and family life, as well as unlawful state interference in the lives and legal status of children who had been under Ukraine’s care.

According to Onysiia Syniuk, Head of Legal Analysis at ZMINA, the third-party submission also addressed violations of the children’s right to identity through the forced imposition of Russian citizenship and simplified procedures for obtaining it, which inherently involve swearing allegiance to the Russian Federation.

The submission also examined the indoctrination and militarisation of Ukrainian children, their placement with Russian families under guardianship or through adoption, and the consequences of these practices.

“Particular attention was paid to restrictions on travel to and from Crimea, which prevented the children from leaving the peninsula and blocked Ukrainian authorities and international organisations from gaining access to them. We supported our analysis of Russian policies with testimony from journalist and PIJL director Nataliya Gumenyuk, who visited Crimea six times between March 2014 and 2020 and witnessed this system being put in place,” Syniuk added.

“From the first days of the occupation in 2014, I travelled to Crimea and documented what Russia was doing to children there. As early as May 2014, at a parade in Sevastopol, I saw preschool children dressed in Russian military uniforms. Later, in Yalta, I witnessed young children taking an oath to Yunarmiya,” Nataliya Gumenyuk said.

“At the same time, passportisation began to be used as a tool of control, teachers came under pressure, and the Ukrainian language was pushed out of schools. These were not chaotic local excesses. This was a coherent, deliberately constructed and centralised policy. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, we at PIJL saw the same system being implemented in newly occupied territories: schools and hospitals were re-registered, teachers were forced to undergo recertification, the rights of people without Russian passports were restricted, and children were removed from residential institutions and educational establishments, as happened in Kherson and Oleshky. Russia developed and tested these methods in Crimea before rolling them out faster and on a much larger scale. Everything that shocked the world after 2022 had already been tested by Russia in Crimea. The only difference is that almost no one was watching at the time.”

In April 2025, the ECHR communicated the application to the Russian government and invited it to submit its formal observations by 31 July 2025. The Court will now proceed to a public hearing involving the parties, during which it will examine both the admissibility of the application and the merits of the case.

“Historically, the abduction of Ukrainian children began in Crimea. The absence of an adequate response to what was happening there made Russia’s mass abduction of children after the full-scale invasion in 2022 possible,” Serhii Zaiets, a lawyer representing the applicants, told ZMINA. “This case is like unravelling a ball of yarn: everything that followed becomes easier to understand once we can see where it all began.”