The case was filed with the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva on behalf of 18 Ukrainian victims of the Russian missile attack two years ago on Vinnytsia in west-central Ukraine.
On July 14, 2022 Russia hit the commercial centre of Vinnytsia with three high-precision guided Kalibr missiles, killing 29 people, including three children, and injuring more than 200 people, the organisations said.
The Clooney Foundation (CFJ), co-founded by film icon George Clooney and his human rights lawyer wife Amal Clooney, along with Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) and Ukrainian NGO Truth Hounds, said they hoped the "landmark complaint" could make it easier to hold Russia to account for abuses committed during its war in Ukraine.
"If our arguments are accepted by the Human Rights Committee, the complaint will set a worldwide precedent," said Anya Neistat, a CFJ legal director.
In the Vinnytsia attack, Russia claimed to have "targeted a high-level military meeting held at one of the buildings struck, but most people killed and injured by the strike were civilians", the NGOs said.
- Untested -
The organisations said they had begun investigating the attack to prove war crimes or crimes against humanity.
But such serious crimes under international humanitarian law are notoriously difficult to prove.
So they also began looking into a previously untested interpretation of human rights law, based on a comment issued in 2019 by the rights committee -- 18 independent experts who monitor how countries implement their civil and political rights obligations under an international covenant.
In its General Comment 36, the committee stated that any killings arising from an act of aggression -- as defined under international law -- amounts to a violation of the victim's right to life.
If applied to attacks during Russia's full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022, it would remove the need to prove lacking proportionality or distinction, and even soldiers battling the aggressor could be counted among the victims, Daniil Ukhorskiy, a LAW litigation officer, told a gathering at the UN in Geneva.
No longer would one need "to tell a mother that their child... is collateral damage or that their child, because they are a soldier who is defending their country, has no option for justice," he said.
- Every death compensated -
Andrew Clapham, an international law professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, hailed the initiative.
If accepted, he said, there would be no need to discuss whether victims were accidentally targeted or hit because fighters were hiding nearby.
"None of that matters in the context of aggression. Every death, every act of destruction, every physical property damage... could be compensated."
The complaint calls on the rights committee to determine that Russia violated the victims' right to life during the Vinnytsia attack.
A ruling in that direction could potentially serve as a precedent for dealing with the thousands of attacks carried out in Russia's war, including the deadly missile barrage against Kyiv and other cities this week, with a direct strike on the country's largest children's hospital.
If the rights committee finds a violation, it can reaffirm a state's obligation to provide effective remedies, which can include compensation, although it does not have a way of enforcing its decisions.
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