Historical politics and court redress in the Baltic States

Abstract

This chapter examines the Baltic states' efforts to frame and interpret communist-era crimes through the lens of three European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decisions. The cases were driven by petitions from citizens from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who, after 1991, failed to get redress in domestic courts on issues related to communist-era actions and offenses. The verdicts in themselves are documents that reflect a certain understanding of the history of the region. In other words, both the decisions and the ways in which communist-era actions are characterized as actionable crimes according to domestic and international law constitute important practices of transitional justice.