Soros credibility with European Court for Human Rights lay in Ruins

A study by the European Center for Law and Justice in Strasbourg has revealed several conflicts of interest between judges at the European Court of Human Rights and NGO’s funded by George Soros.

The European Center for Law and Justice is an NGO which often appears at the court to campaign on social, family and religion-related issues.

The study has found that, out of the 100 judges who have served on the bench of the European Court of Human Rights in the period 2009-2019, about 22% of them have strong links to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation or to NGO’s like Amnesty International and others which are funded by it.

Human Rights Watch, for instance, has received $100 million from the Open Society Foundation since 2010. Some of the NGOs receive so much of their budget from Soros that they are in effect wholly owned subsidiaries of his foundation.

The links between the judges and the NGO’s are substantial. They include working for years as members of the board of directors or executive council of these NGOs; having teaching posts at institutes funded by them.

A good example is that of the Bulgarian Yonko Grozev who, as leader of the Open Society Justice Initiative, defended the Pussy Riot case against Russia in 2018 before being elected as a judge of the court shortly thereafter.

The report also covers other human rights officers, such as the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe from 2012-2018 (Nils Muiznieks) in Latvia, who has used his official position to campaign against the so-called “anti-Soros” legislation in Hungary.

These NGO’s are extremely active at the ECHR. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland filed 16 applications, and defended 32 cases, in 2017 alone.

Very often the role played by the NGO’s does not appear in the court’s records but has to be discovered from the NGOs’ own reports instead.

There would not be anything wrong with judges having exercised a salaried activity for an NGO prior to becoming a judge if these same organizations were not themselves active as parties who bring cases to the ECHR.

Or either as applicants themselves, as lawyers for applicants, or as third parties giving supposedly expert evidence (but in reality lobbying for a cause), and if those judges did not then hear those cases.

The judges’ refusal to withdraw is a disgraceful professional failing which shows that Europe’s supreme human rights body is not, in fact, independent but is instead part of veritable “human rights industry”.

This represents a pyramid of money and a tight network of professional relationships, at the top of which sits George Soros with his billions.

The fact that this corrupt system has been able to flourish has several causes. The first is that Soros and the NGO’s he finances dominate the human rights industry across the Balkans and in the Baltic states.

His millions flood these small, poor countries (he has spent $131 million in Albania since 1992, for instance) and they in turn appoint judges to the ECHR which rules on human rights issues for the 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

Indeed, the report finds that the total spending of the Open Society Foundation in Europe, $90 million a year, actually exceeds the annual budget of the European Court of Human Rights ($70 million).

Finally, there is no requirement that people appointed to be judges at the ECHR have any judicial experience at all. Some 51 out of the 100 judges who have sat on the ECHR bench since 2009 had never been judges or magistrates before.

Instead, they were very often human rights activists working for Soros or one of his front organization.

The result is that the judges who sit on these bodies do not, in fact, behave as judges should. The role of the judge is to say what the law is, not to say what he or she thinks the law should be. Unfortunately, this is exactly what judges at the ECHR, and at the new international tribunals, do.

It is a travesty because the areas in which ECHR judges exercise their judicial activism are precisely the most politically sensitive issues, which should properly be decided by politicians in elected parliaments, or by referenda, and not by an elite caste of unaccountable activists.

RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2020.