Digital trail of missing Ukrainian children leads to stop at Europe’s human rights court

The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union asked the European Court of Human Rights to hold Russia responsible for the disappearance of ten Ukrainian children, ages 1 to 5 at the time, who were living in Crimean institutions when Russia seized the peninsula in 2014. The union says Russian authorities imposed citizenship on the children, listed them on adoption websites, and refused Ukraine's requests to transfer them, with records later placing some in institutions in Rostov and Lipetsk.

Russia submitted no arguments and sent no representative to the hearing, though it ceased being a treaty party in 2022 after its expulsion from the Council of Europe and remains answerable for conduct before that date. Only one of the children's adoption profiles remains online, and the union acknowledges available records cannot establish every child's current whereabouts.

Judges pressed the union on a filing delay of nearly nine years, with the union explaining that identifying individual children behind the listings took far longer than discovering the listings existed. The court gave the union one week to submit further profile details in writing, with no date yet set for a ruling on whether the case can proceed.

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