SELISHCHEVA AND OTHERS v. RUSSIA - 39056/22 (Article 8 - Right to respect for private and family life : Third Section) [2025] ECHR 126 (27 May 2025)

Executive summary

The European Court of Human Rights examined complaints by ten Russian nationals who were refused registration as municipal election candidates after police information was used to treat them as having been "involved" with organisations later designated extremist. The judgment held that the collection and storage of their political data, and the use of that data to bar candidacy, lacked a clear legal framework and sufficient safeguards, and that the interference was not in accordance with law or necessary in a democratic society.

Key points

• Applicants: ten Russian nationals, all denied registration as candidates in the Berdsk municipal elections.
• Article 8 holding: collection and storage of political data shared with electoral authorities violated private-life rights because the framework was ad hoc, opaque, and lacked access, challenge, retention, deletion, and independent review safeguards.
• Reasoning on surveillance/data use: the Court treated the political data as sensitive and noted a chilling effect, with no violent conduct justifying surveillance and no clear rules on retention or deletion.
• Electoral disqualification issue: candidacy bans based on alleged "involvement" with extremist organisations were applied to lawful pre-designation activities, creating legal uncertainty and retroactive penalisation concerns.
• The judgment is directly relevant to sanctions/geopolitical risk insofar as it highlights how state authorities may use politically sensitive data and broad labels such as "extremist" to exclude opposition actors from public life.
• No export-control issue appears in the source text.

Why it matters

For sanctions and sovereign-risk analysis, the case shows a rights-based judicial critique of opaque political-data collection and of disqualifying individuals on the basis of broad security labels. That matters because it signals elevated litigation and reputational risk where domestic authorities use administrative or security designations to restrict political participation.

Implications

Compliance and litigation teams should treat politically exposed or opposition-linked data as sensitive when assessing Russian regulatory and enforcement exposure, especially where the state relies on non-transparent intelligence-sharing to justify restrictions. For challenge strategy, the decision supports arguments that election bans or similar sanctions-like measures require clear legal basis, individualized evidence, and procedural safeguards rather than retrospective attribution of unlawful status to lawful conduct.