George Soros Controls the EU’s Court of Human Rights, They Admit It Themselves

ER Editor: We remind readers of this report that we published toward the end of February, titled The Grip of Soros on the European Court of Human Rights Revealed. This was our introduction to the piece:

A report by Dr. Gregor Puppinck (pictured), head of the European Centre for Law and Justice, recently came out after six months of study, in which it was revealed that a sizeable portion of the judges working for the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) were, at some point in the past, working for George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) or related NGOs. Valeurs Actuelles, the go-to magazine for those on the right, where Macron will go when he has to pitch a right-leaning idea publicly, published an exclusive report just in the last week on Puppinck’s findings, which seems to have found its way into independent French-language reporting according to a google search. Alas, the MSM aren’t touching it.

The ECHR generally seems to be pushing a ‘progressive’ social agenda on many states, to which each has sent a judge to represent it. These aren’t just 27 EU states, in fact, but a total of 47 in all (see map). Their rulings, often relating to issues such as gay marriage, the right to abortion, gay couple adoption, the right to change sex, assisted contraception and surrogate mothers, etc., have force over the nation state, obliging countries to go along with these decisions by giving reparations to victims, and to change their laws and judicial practices. The ECHR’s decisions matter, especially when they have increasingly come out of a particular ideology, that of Soros. Of 100 judges in all since 2009, 22 are found to be related in some way, directly or indirectly, to the OSF and six other NGOs, which are financed by the OSF.

So, two months after the publication of Dr. Puppinck’s research into the worryingly politicized agenda of the ECHR, what has transpired? Only something which entirely affirms the worst suspicions of the Court’s critics.

Readers may be interested in this piece by Gefira from 2017, which gives Soros pal Yonko Grozev an honorable mention: Soros and the European Court of Human Rights: a sentence for insider trading and two judges associated with Open Society.

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Yes, the European Court of Human Rights Depends on George Soros.

On February 25, I asked in an article whether the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) depends on George Soros. The article relied on a devastating report by the European Center for Law & Justice (ECLJ) in Strasbourg entitled Les ONG et les juges de la CEDH, 2009-2019 [“NGOs and the Judges of the ECHR, 2009 – 2019” — available also in English and Spanish]. After two months, the ECHR has, by its actions, confirmed and strengthened the case of Soros’s influence on the Court. How, and why, are the subjects of a new ECLJ exposé by its Director, Grégor Puppinck, who is also a member of the Committee of Experts on the Reform of the ECHR. He is also the co-author of the February report. Before covering the new report, however, here is some background.

The ECLJ’s February Findings

The ECLJ is an international organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights and religious freedom throughout the world. ECLJ has held special Consultative Status before the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations since 2007.

After a meticulous six-month investigation regarding the decade between 2009-2019, it produced the above-mentioned report, concluding that out of the 100 permanent judges of the Court, 22—almost a quarter of the assembly—have links to seven particular NGOs. In fact, before becoming judges on the Court, these individuals were collaborators and sometimes even managers of the NGOs in question. The organizations, in alphabetical order, to which the judges are tied are as follow:

Of those 22 judges, 12 have had direct relationships with Open Society, making it the single NGO in the list to which the most judges are connected (a fact attested in the judges’ own biographies as given on the website of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). What is more, the six other NGOs identified in the report are financed by Open Society.

The report also found that 18 of the 22 judges had heard cases on the court presented or supported by Open Society. In the ten years taken into consideration, the report identified 88 cases that it defined as “problematic” in this regard. Additionally, in many more cases there were also links between the judges and the NGOs, though indirect ones and therefore not identifiable by the “problematic” standard adopted in the report.

In sum, the February report clearly establishes that what is at stake here is nothing less than the independence of the Court and the transparency of its work: important questions for the body that arbitrates the matter of human rights in Europe! The ultimate question that comes into view is whether the Court is swayed by Open Society—i.e. billionaire George Soros’ network of organizations that propagates and finances abortion propaganda and transgender ideology throughout the world.

“The Most Controversial Judge”

So, two months after the February report, the ECHR has acted so as to only confirm the concerns contained therein: by electing a man Dr. Puppinck calls “the most controversial judge”—Bulgarian Yonko Grozev—to the important post of “section president”. Why does Puppinck find Grozev “most controversial?” He writes:

“Grozev has spent his entire career as a lawyer and activist in NGOs close to George Soros or financed by him, until he became one of the world leaders of the Open Society branch specialising in the use of judicial institutions for political purposes (the Open Society Justice Initiative). He became known, inter alia, as a lawyer for a group of punk women (Pussy Riot) who committed a sacrilegious act in Moscow Cathedral.”

To be clear, we at iFamNews are strongly convinced that everyone has the right to a defense attorney. (This is, in fact, one of the most luminous legacies given to world civilization by the Middle Ages, including the Inquisition, as the Italian-American specialist John Tedeschi clearly highlights in his The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy.) And we know all too well that only despotisms and totalitarianisms deny this important right of a competent legal defense. Nevertheless, these facts about Grozev do provoke our journalistic curiosity.

As Dr. Puppinck further details, “Already in 2014, the modalities of [Grozev’s] nomination in Strasbourg had been challenged, as three members of the Bulgarian selection committee were his NGO fellows. A complaint to the Council of Europe by a local organisation about the irregularity of the selection procedure was dismissed.” And the irregularities run deeper: Mr. Grozev, says Puppinck, was an “activist”, with “no experience as a magistrate (like the majority of the judges in Strasbourg),” when he was appointed as a judge on the ECHR. Then, “[s]hortly after his election, his new colleagues ruled in his favour in the Pussy Riot case and ordered Russia to pay him, as is customary, substantial compensation.”

Advancing Even Higher

Once Mr. Grozev had been nominated as a judge, Puppinck explains, several cases came up “which he had brought before the ECHR himself as a lawyer, or which had been brought by his former NGOs.” Puppinck says that while in 9 such cases Grozev recused himself, “he still participated in the judgment of at least 10 other cases brought or supported by NGOs which he himself had founded or directed until recently.” Puppinck provides a listing of these cases. Puppinck goes on, “such conduct constitutes a serious and repeated breach of a judge’s basic ethical obligations” and “in any state governed by the rule of law, the [subject] of such breaches would be liable to severe disciplinary sanctions.” The Bulgarian Ministry of Justice even publicly raised the possibility of Mr. Grozev’s dismissal, though it left the matter to the ECHR itself to decide.

Now, though, Grozev has advanced even higher in the ECHR, as he “will head one of the five sections of the Court, will exercise general management powers within the Court, and will systematically sit in the most important cases.” He will also have power within his section to decide “alone, on a case-by-case basis, whether to invite, allow or refuse the intervention of NGOs in cases.” Not a bad gig, if you can get it…

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Original article

Marco Respinti is the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He is an Italian professional journalist, essayist, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan, he is also a founding member as well as Board member of the Center for European Renewal, a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He serves also as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights in China.

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