Importance of Expert reports and testimony on Russia for U.S. asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT cases

What a Press-Access Case Against Russia Can Do for Your Client's Country-Conditions Record

2026-08-30 00:45
A practitioner's note on Sivoldaev v. Russia, one of nine judgments the European Court of Human Rights will hand down on September 3, 2026
If you handle asylum, withholding, or CAT claims involving Russia, you already know the hardest evidentiary problem in these cases isn't proving that Russian institutions can behave badly. It's proving that a returning client would have no meaningful way to seek redress if they did — that the courts a returnee would actually have to rely on don't function as a real check on the state or on powerful private defendants. General country reports assert this. Adjudicated findings, from a court that heard both sides and tested the record, demonstrate it. On September 3, 2026, the European Court of Human Rights will hand down a judgment that does exactly that, on a narrow but useful question: can a Russian civil court close its doors to the press and the public with no explanation, and with no one able to challenge that decision?
I represent the applicant in that case, Sivoldaev v. Russia, and in the related case it arises from, Sablina and Others v. Russia. I'm writing this for the practitioners who may find both useful in their own filings.

The underlying facts

Sablina and Others concerns the removal of a 19-year-old woman's organs — her heart, kidneys, adrenal glands, and portions of her aorta and vena cava — for transplantation, without her family's knowledge or consent, following her death in a Moscow hospital in January 2014. Her mother and grandmothers brought a civil claim against the hospital and the Moscow city health department. At the defendant hospital's request, the trial court closed the proceedings entirely, over the applicants' objection, and later declined a request to open the hearing partially. The applicants — the people with the strongest interest in disclosure — wanted the proceedings public. The court closed them anyway, and never explained why the interest it was protecting outweighed theirs.
A journalist tried to attend that same hearing and was excluded. His separate application, lodged in July 2015, is Sivoldaev v. Russia. It raises Articles 6 and 10 of the Convention: the right to a public hearing and public pronouncement of judgment, and freedom of the press to receive and impart information. This was not a criminal matter, and it involved no minors, no state secrets, and no issue of public order — none of the grounds Article 6 itself recognizes as legitimate reasons to close a civil trial.

The gap that matters for your practice

The application makes a point that should interest anyone building a country-conditions record: Russian civil procedure gave the journalist no standing to challenge the closure order at all (even worse is happening in criminal procedure). Not that he raised the objection and lost — there was no procedural vehicle for a non-party to raise it in the first place. The trial court's closure order was, as a practical matter, unreviewable by anyone outside the two litigants.
That is a different, and for evidentiary purposes a more useful, finding than "a Russian court ruled against a family" or "a Russian court excluded the press." Individual adverse rulings can be — and often are — dismissed by adjudicators as case-specific outcomes that don't necessarily speak to the system as a whole. A structural finding that the system provides no mechanism to review an unreasoned closure order, regardless of who is affected or why, is a finding about the system's architecture, not about one judge's discretion in one case. It is the kind of finding that translates directly into the "no meaningful avenue for redress" element of a persecution or CAT analysis, because it doesn't depend on the facts of any one client's case — it describes a structural absence that would apply to your client's case too, whatever its specifics.

Why the pending judgment is worth watching now

I want to be precise about where things stand: the Court has not yet ruled. What exists so far is a communicated application with detailed factual findings, briefed by both sides — already a stronger evidentiary anchor than press reporting or advocacy-group summaries, but not yet a judgment. On September 3, that changes. A finding by the Court — a tribunal that heard the Russian government's position and tested it against the record — carries evidentiary weight that self-reported government assurances about judicial openness don't, and that is worth building into a country-conditions report or expert declaration citing this case once the judgment issues, not before.
There's a second layer worth knowing about, separate from the judgment's text. Once an ECHR judgment becomes final, its execution — what measures a state takes or doesn't take in response — falls under the supervision of the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers, under Article 46 of the Convention. That is a standing, public process with its own case-by-case registry, including for judgments against Russia: coe.int/en/web/execution/russian-federation. Under Russian legislation enacted in 2022, Russia does not treat ECHR judgments that became final after March 15, 2022 as domestically binding — which will include the Sivoldaev judgment and the other eight decided September 3. What that means practically is that the Committee of Ministers' handling of this case over the following months and years becomes its own independent, trackable data point: whether the case is docketed for supervision, what (if anything) gets reported, and how long it stays open. For a practice area where "things may have changed since the last country report" is a routine cross-examination point, having a live, dated, institutional record to point to — rather than a static citation — is a genuine asset.

How this fits into an expert record

I prepare country-conditions expert reports and testify as an expert witness in U.S. immigration courts specifically on Russian state and quasi-state institutional practice — not what Russian law says on paper, but what Russian courts, agencies, and hospitals actually do, evidenced through documented, adversarially-tested records rather than secondhand reporting. Sivoldaev and Sablina are two of nine such records becoming available on September 3, spanning organ-transplant consent practices, closed civil proceedings, and the absence of third-party remedies in Russian courts. I've represented the applicants in all of them since as early as 2013, through the full exhaustion of domestic remedies and the entirety of the Strasbourg proceedings, and I can speak to the domestic record — the actual court filings, rulings, and procedural history — underlying each one, not just the Court's eventual summary of it.
If you have a pending matter where the openness and reviewability of Russian judicial proceedings is a live issue — or where a client's account of being denied a meaningful remedy needs corroboration beyond general reporting — I'd be glad to talk about whether this record, or a tailored expert report drawing on it, would be useful to your case. You can reach me through strategiclitigation.center.
I'll publish a follow-up once the September 3 judgments are public, with an analysis of what the Court actually found in each of the nine cases.
Dr Anton Burkov is the founder of the Strategic Litigation Center and a country conditions expert witness on the Russian Federation in United States immigration and asylum proceedings. He has litigated before the European Court of Human Rights for two decades and represents the applicants in Popov v. Russia, OOO Plastik Payp v. Russia, Tiunov v. Russia, Korolevy v. Russia, Sivoldayev v. Russia, Valyushchenko v. Russia, Sablina and Others v. Russia and Mardar v. Russia. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona, and is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Enquiries: ab@strategiclitigation.center | +1 (470) 404-2105