The trials of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and former General Ratko Mladić continued at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as it slowly worked its way through the few remaining cases pending before it. At the national level, progress in ensuring accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the various conflicts in the former Yugoslavia remained painfully slow. The number of new indictments remained low, trials dragged on and political attacks on national war crimes courts continued. War crimes courts, prosecutors and investigative units remained understaffed and under-resourced as the lack of political will to deliver justice increasingly hid behind the expressed desire to move on.
Across the region, civilian victims of war, including victims of sexual violence, continued to be denied access to reparations due to the failure to adopt comprehensive legislation regulating their status and
guaranteeing their rights. In September, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina signed a regional co-operation agreement with a view to accelerating the to-date slow progress in resolving the fate and returning the bodies of the many thousands of people still missing since the conflict. The rights and livelihoods of relatives in all three countries continued to be undermined by the lack of legislation on missing persons.
In Northern Ireland, the mechanisms and institutions set up or mandated to address conflict-related human rights violations continued to operate in a fragmented and often unsatisfactory manner. The Historical Enquiries Team, set up in 2006 to re-examine all deaths attributed to the conflict, was closed following widespread criticism. Some of its work was planned to be transferred to a new unit within the Police Service of Northern Ireland, prompting concerns over the independence of future case reviews. The major Northern Ireland parties agreed in principle in December 2014 to take forward proposals set out a year earlier by US diplomat Richard Haass for two new mechanisms: a Historical Investigation Unit and an Independent Commission for Information Retrieval. Details of finance, resourcing, timeframes and legislation, however, were not completely resolved.
COUNTER-TERROR AND SECURITY
Across the region, governments remained tight-lipped about the extent of their surveillance of internet-based communications, despite the protestations of many in the wake of the revelations of the extent of the US surveillance programme by Edward Snowden in 2013. In the UK, Amnesty International and other NGO litigants sought unsuccessfully to challenge the human rights compatibility of the UK’s surveillance system through the courts and will now seek review in Strasbourg.
EU countries continued to use unreliable diplomatic assurances to return individuals considered a risk to national security to
countries where they faced a risk of torture or other ill-treatment. The practice gained increasing currency in Russia as it sought to circumvent repeated European Court of Human Rights rulings staying the extradition of wanted individuals to Central Asian countries. Across the former Soviet Union, co-operating states frequently returned - both legally and clandestinely - terror suspects wanted in other countries in which they faced the very strong likelihood of torture.
The security situation in the North Caucasus remained volatile and security operations were routinely marred by serious human rights violations. In a particularly vivid illustration of law enforcement abuses, forces loyal to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov made good on his threat to seek reprisals against the families of perpetrators of a large-scale attack on Grozny in December, by burning down several houses.
In Turkey, broadly framed anti-terrorism legislation continued to be used to prosecute the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, though new limits set on the maximum length of pre-trial detention resulted in the release of many.
DISCRIMINATION
Discrimination continued to affect the lives of millions across the region. Long-standing victims of prejudice, including Roma, Muslims and migrants bore much of the brunt, but anti-Semitism also remained widespread and sporadically manifested itself in violent attacks. There were both advances and setbacks in the respect for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people.
Political declarations, action plans and national strategies continued to have minimal impact on the lives of millions of marginalized Roma - invariably because they were not accompanied by the necessary political will to implement them and because they consistently failed to identify and tackle the main reason behind the social exclusion of Roma, namely prejudice and racism.
As a result, the discrimination of Roma in housing, education and employment remained widespread. Hundreds of thousands of Roma living in informal settlements continued to struggle to access social housing or were excluded by criteria that failed to recognize, let alone prioritize, their manifest need. Legislative initiatives designed to tackle the insecurity of tenure of those in informal settlements were mooted in a number of countries, but nowhere adopted. As a result, people living in informal settlements across Europe remained vulnerable to forced evictions.
The segregation of Roma in education remained widespread throughout central and eastern Europe, particularly in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, despite repeated promises by national authorities to address a long-identified problem. In a positive development, the EU initiated infringement proceedings against the Czech Republic for breach of EU anti-discrimination legislation (the Race Equality Directive) for the
discrimination of Roma in education. Italy and a number of other undisclosed EU states were also being examined by the EU Commission for other possible breaches of the Race Equality Directive for discrimination against Roma in a range of areas - signalling at last, perhaps, a willingness on the part of the EU to enforce legislation adopted a decade ago.
In July, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the French ban on the complete covering of the face in public did not violate any of the rights set out in the European Convention of Human Rights, despite its obvious targeting of full face veils and the restrictions entailed on the rights to freedoms of expression, religious belief and non-discrimination of Muslim women choosing to wear them. In a perverse ruling with worrying implications for freedom of expression, the European Court justified the restrictions by reference to the nebulous requirements of “living together”.
Violent hate crimes - targeting in particular Roma, Muslims, Jews, migrants and LGBTI
individuals - continued across the continent. Several countries, including a number of EU member states, still failed to include sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds in hate crime legislation. Across the region, hate crimes remained under- reported and poorly investigated. Stand- alone hate crime offences and penal code provisions allowing discriminatory motives to be punished as an aggravating circumstance were frequently unused, as investigators failed to investigate possible discriminatory motives and prosecutors failed to charge perpetrators appropriately, or present relevant evidence in court.
A growing number of countries granted equal rights to same-sex partnerships (though rarely in respect of adoption) and successful, safe Pride marches were held for the first time in Serbia and Montenegro, under the watchful eye of the EU. Homophobia remained widespread, however, and growing tolerance in the west was often matched - indeed pointed to as a reason for - greater restrictions on the freedom of expression of LGBTI individuals further east. In Russia, LGBTI activists were routinely prevented from organizing public events, with local authorities often invoking legislation prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality among minors. Similar legislation was used to ban a book of fairy tales, including stories of same-sex relationships, in Lithuania. In Kyrgyzstan legislation banning the “promotion of non- traditional sexual relations” was considered by Parliament. Attacks on LGBTI individuals, organizations and events were common occurrences throughout much of eastern Europe and the Balkans, and were rarely responded to appropriately by indifferent criminal justice systems.