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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2018
On December 12, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights adopted its judgments on the compensation awarded to the applicants in the two landmark cases of Chiragov and Others v. Armenia and Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan. The Court ruled on the just satisfaction for the pecuniary and nonpecuniary damages incurred by the applicants, following the adoption of the principal judgments of June 16, 2015, on the merits of the cases establishing violations of the rights of families displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1990s. In these cases, the Court has for the first time dealt with the states' responsibility for violations of rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals forced to flee their homes and leave their property as a result of escalations of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which remains unresolved. The Court reserved the issue of just satisfaction for a later stage due to the “exceptional nature” of the cases, i.e., their relation to continuous violations in the context of the unresolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories.
1 Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, Judgment (Just Satisfaction), App. No. 13216/05 (Eur. Ct. H.R., 2017), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-179554 [hereinafter Chiragov Just Satisfaction].
2 Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan, Judgment (Just Satisfaction), App. No. 40167/06 (Eur. Ct. H.R., 2017), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-179555 [hereinafter Sargsyan Just Satisfaction].
3 Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, Judgment, App. No. 13216/05 (Eur. Ct. H.R., 2015), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-108383 [hereinafter Chiragov Judgment]; Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan, Judgment, App. No. 40167/06 (Eur. Ct. H.R., 2015), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-155662 [hereinafter Sargsyan Judgment].
4 In its two separate admissibility decisions published in December 2011, the Court established its competence ratione temporis and determined that the applicants complied with the six-month-rule requirement to introduce an application on the basis that the lack of access to property is a continuing situation and that the applications had been filed without any undue delay. It further declared the applications admissible in relation to the requirement of exhaustion of domestic remedies and examined it together with the merits of the cases. It then ruled that the states failed to demonstrate that there had been any effective domestic remedies available to the applicants and that this issue had to be assessed against the general background of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
5 Chiragov Just Satisfaction, supra note 1, ¶¶ 44–45; Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶¶ 26–27.
6 OSCE Minsk Group, https://www.osce.org/mg.
7 Chiragov Just Satisfaction, supra note 1, ¶ 199; Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶ 238; European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, Briefing Note: Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan and Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, presented to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on May 24, 2016, http://ehrac.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Briefing-note-on-Nagorno-Karabakh-cases.pdf.
8 Marko Milanovic, The Nagorno-Karabakh Cases, EJIL: Talk! (June 23, 2015), https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-nagorno-karabakh-cases/.
9 Chiragov Just Satisfaction, supra note 1, ¶¶ 53, 59, 80; Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶¶ 35, 42, 57.
10 Chiragov Just Satisfaction, supra note 1, ¶ 60; Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶ 43.
11 Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶ 43.
12 Philip Leach, Thawing the Frozen Conflict? The European Court's Nagorno-Karabakh Judgments, EJIL: Talk! (July 6, 2015), https://www.ejiltalk.org/thawing-the-frozen-conflict-the-european-courts-nagorno-karabakh-judgments/.
13 Chiragov Just Satisfaction, supra note 1, ¶ 198; Sargsyan Just Satisfaction, supra note 2, ¶ 237.
