Grand Chamber, European Court of Human Rights, Judgment of 9 July 2025, Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia

Mohammed Abbas and Rana Sabah

On 9 July 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered an important judgment in the case of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, holding Russia responsible for some of the most serious violations ever recognised under the European Convention on Human Rights: extrajudicial killings, systematic torture, arbitrary detention, and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Amid these significant judicial findings, another, less obvious outcome has emerged that deserves attention. The Court found that Russia had practised ‘filtration’: a standardised administrative procedure across the occupied territories of Ukraine, particularly in the Donetsk region, where peoplewere systematically searched and digital and biometric data collected, mainly at checkpoints and border crossings, including children as young as fourteen years old. The Grand Chamber concluded that this constituted a violation of the right to private life under Article 8 of the Convention. 

 This brief article argues that the true significance of the screening process lies not in extending the scope of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to cover times of war and peace (as the Court notes that international humanitarian law does not explicitly prohibit such security measures), but in what the provision implicitly reveals: that the screening process, allegedly to identify enemy combatants,served as a enabling violation and an information infrastructure directing targeted civilians towards the most serious violations set out in Articles 2, 3 and 5. As the evidence presented to the court and the parallel findings of the United Nations make clear, this targeting was by no means gender-neutral but extended to other areas; in other words, this filtering served as a gateway to further violations.  

  In at least 21 screening centres, the Russian occupying authorities confiscated mobile phones and laptops, copied databases, catalogued IMEI numbers and passports, and collected biometric data on fingerprints and facial features. In effect, by recording any sign of Ukrainian affiliation – a photograph, a flag, a tattoo – these measures were sufficient to isolate the victims and intensify their interrogation and torture. Consequently, the court found that the system was so uniform and administratively organised that it could not be regarded as rogue behaviour or an ‘incidental measure’, and that it had absolutely no valid legal basis whatsoever, whether under Russian federal law, the alleged legal acts of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ / “Luhansk People’s Republic”, or under Ukrainian domestic law.  

  In the same context, it can be concluded anenabling violationwhich, whilst unlawful in its own right, constitutes a precondition that systematically facilitates the occurrence of more serious violations; in other words, it acts as a gateway to more serious violations. The role of the data collection component in the ‘Filtration’ system was not limited to infringing on privacy; rather, as evidenced by the Court’s findings regarding Articles 2, 3 and 5, it became the diagnostic and selection mechanism used by the Russian occupying authority to identify individuals, isolate them and direct physical harmtowardsthem. Consequently, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights did not characterise this causal relationship and connection as a separate category of violation; however, despite this conclusion, there is no other explanation that reconciles its deliberate sequencing of the findings under Article 8 with the atrocities documented elsewhere in the judgment itself. 

This screening process and mechanism were gender-based from the outset. The screening procedures routinely separated men and women for processing purposes, a pattern and methodopen-source investigators tracking conflict-related sexual and gender-based crimes in Ukraine treat as a red flagthat warrants further legal review and scrutiny. For men, the data and information extracted during the screening process from images featuring military insignia, flags and tattoos served as the catalyst for interrogation, torture and long-term detention.

For women, this very environment – characterised by coercion, violence and the stripping of their credentials – has created a different path:UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented rape used during interrogation as a tool of coercion and punishment, alongside forced nudity in the presence of male guardsWithin the same framework and structure of detention that feeds into the selection process. The digital extraction network of this structure and the selection process overlap rather than running in parallel: it is the device extraction, the image and biometrics that determines who is targeted in the first place.

Women’s rights monitors tracking the Russian occupationof Ukraine have likewise referred to “practices of forced registration” as a distinct and recognised harm faced by women in the occupied territories, alongside sexual violence associated with armed conflict and arbitrary detention. The Grand Chamber’s reasoning regarding Article 8, which was formulated in relation to the general civilian population of Ukraine, does not address this differential impact. This is not a shortcoming limited to this judicial ruling alone, but rather a characteristic of how litigation concerning mass surveillance harms is conducted. However, it leaves a gap that legal scholarship should have filled: the enabling violation that categorises the population by sex and gender, and directs each sex towards a different trajectory of subsequent harm, is not adequately covered by a non-gendered account of the violation of privacy under Article 8 of the Convention.The process of Filtration was not merely a conduit and gateway for atrocities in general, but a conduit with gendered ramifications.  

 In fact, this understanding is deeply rooted in the stereotypes associated with the concept of gender: the occupying authorities operate on the fundamental assumption that combat is exclusively male – ignoring the significant service of women in the Ukrainian armed forces – systematically reclassifying women as targets for sexual coercion, forced nudity, and administrative control.

This principle is echoed in the European Union’s data protection regime. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights’ insistence that biometric data warrants enhanced and double protection, regardless of security justifications, is consistent with the ‘special categories’ regime in  Article 9 GDPR of the General Data Protection Regulation, which subjects biometric data, and data revealing sexual orientation, to a definitive minimum level of protection, given their potential to enable subsequent targeted or discriminatory treatment. The Strasbourg Court does not explicitly refer to this link or causal relationship, nor to the connection between biometrics and gender; both are implicit in its reasoning. 

  The Grand Chamber, at the highest level of inter-state litigation, affirmed that the large-scale collection of biometric data and the extraction of devices by an occupying power constitutes an interference in its own right and an unjustified infringement of Article 8 of the Convention, without any concessions regarding the military necessity provided for under international humanitarian law. Its deeper contribution lies in the causal structure it delineates—albeit implicitly—between digital intrusion and grave physical atrocities. Reading this structure through a gender lens does not weaken the ‘enabling violation’ hypothesis, but rather clearly complements it. Digital surveillance under occupation does not merely enable the commission of atrocities in the abstract; rather, it enables them along fault lines, including those related to gender, which the occupying authorities are already exploiting.