From Register to Remedy: Promises and Limits of the Draft Convention Establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine

[Illia Chernohorenko served as Director-General for the Rule of Law Directorate at the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, consulted the President of Ukraine on legal reform, and worked at the Supreme Court, representing it in the ECtHR’s Superior Courts Network. He is currently a research resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Oxford, pursuing a DPhil on repurposing state assets as redress for human rights violations.

The author has no financial or professional involvement with the Council of Europe, the Register of Damage for Ukraine, or the drafting of the Convention]

The Council of Europe has now published a draft Convention Establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine. It is an ambitious piece of institutional engineering: it would take the reparations effort from documentation to decisions on quantum, and it would do so at scale. The strong parts of the text are easy to see. It anchors the Commission in public international law, borrows the mass-claims DNA of prior mechanisms, plugs directly into the already-operational Register of Damage, and makes the Commission’s decisions final. At the same time, the draft treaty pulls its punches where politics bite hardest. It sets a narrow temporal baseline (from 2022, not 2014), leaves financing to later, invites Russia to join on generous terms unlikely to be taken up soon, and makes national enforcement optional. Those choices do not doom the project, but they do shape the path to delivering justice.

The draft’s design strengths deserve credit. It establishes an independent body within the Council of Europe with international legal personality, clear organs (Assembly, Council, Panels, Secretariat), and a division of labor. Most importantly, it treats the Register of Damage for Ukraine (RD4U) as the mechanism’s first component: once the Assembly gives the green light, the Commission inherits the Register’s digital platform, evidence base, archives, and contracts, so claims already filed flow straight into adjudication. That continuity – moving from recording to deciding – is the heart of the model and the reason it can process very large volumes of claims while keeping evidentiary standards coherent. The text of the draft treaty also commits to transparency, independence, and conflict-management rules, which are essential for legitimacy when decisions are final and appeal is unavailable.

The Temporal Scope: A Welcome Signal, but Not a Solution

The weak points begin with time. The treaty’s operative scope starts on or after 24 February 2022, the day of the full-scale invasion, while the preamble and Article 33(2) signal that Members may later extend coverage back to 20 February 2014. In practice, that caveat has little added legal effect. Any multilateral convention can be amended; the caveat functions more as a political signal than as a genuine legal innovation. It reflects an understandable compromise – acknowledging Ukraine’s demand to capture harm since 2014 without derailing consensus today – but it creates a disconnect between expectations and operational reality. If states truly intended to cover 2014–2022, the treaty could have said so now and tasked the Council to phase intake, or to rely on dedicated procedural rules for earlier harms as capacity grows. That would have been cleaner and more honest about staging. As drafted, the “2014 option” is a welcome signal but not a solution. Ultimately, it keeps the door open without getting anyone through it.

Financing and Enforcement: Where Law Meets Politics

The second weak point is money – and here the law and the politics run on parallel tracks. Article 21 “expects” the Russian Federation to fund compensation and relieves other Members from any duty to pay awards; decisions are not automatically enforceable in domestic courts unless a Member chooses to make them so. That conservatism is at odds with one of the most feasible innovation now on the table: the proposal to extend a reparations loan to Ukraine backed by the cash balances of immobilised Russian central bank assets, with Ukraine repaying only once Russian reparations arrive. If that program advances, it will need a credible, rules-based body to produce the compensation decisions that anchor repayment. The Commission described in this treaty can be that body, even if the awards are not themselves domestically enforceable. In other words, the draft treaty’s caution about Member funding should not be read as hostility to creative financing; it simply declines to pre-commit states to paying awards out of pocket.

How the Commission Would Operate

What, then, would the Commission actually do? It is an administrative mass-claims body. Panels of three Commissioners will review claims, apply uniform evidentiary and valuation rules adopted by the Council and approved by the Assembly, determine compensation, and send reasoned recommendations to the Council. The Council adopts those recommendations unless it remits them with guidance or, in rare cases, refers them to a short-lived review panel. The system is designed for throughput, not adversarial trial: grouping by claim type, standardising proof and valuation schedules, and publishing decisions to build predictable practice. Crucially, the Register continues inside the Commission: submission and processing of claims remain digital and category-based, with the existing data backbone preserved. It goes without saying that continuity matters because the Register is already open for multiple categories and expects millions of filings.

Two operational details deserve attention because they will shape performance and perceived fairness. First, Commissioners. The draft lists the right qualities – independence, integrity, multidisciplinary expertise – but is silent on age thresholds, minimum years of experience, and balanced expertise profiles. It also does not fix the total number of Commissioners. Instead, the Council will appoint Commissioners from an approved roster and create as many three-member Panels as workload requires. Flexibility is helpful, but clearer baselines would improve legitimacy. The Rules could, for example, set minimum professional experience, require mixed legal and valuation skillsets on each Panel, and ensure geographic and gender balance. Second, transparency and data protection. The draft treaty promises both, and the Register’s own rules already model how to publish without compromising personal data. The Commission should adopt similar publication practices early to build confidence and reduce speculation about valuation and evidentiary thresholds.

Membership and Russia’s Place at the Table

Membership and Russia’s possible participation are framed with diplomatic care. The Russian Federation may accede at any time if it accepts responsibility, undertakes to honor decisions, and reimburses Members’ costs. That approach is normatively right and politically necessary, but it is not a plan for delivering compensation in the near term. Victims’ relief cannot depend on the unlikely prospect of Russia’s early participation. Instead, these clauses are better understood as an offramp for the future – a way of signaling that the Commission is not designed to exclude Russia permanently.

Entry Into Force: A Matter of Arithmetic and Will

One aspect where precision helps is entry into force. The draft requires twenty-five ratifications and that the ratifying states’ assessed shares, taken together, represent at least 50 percent of the Register’s 2025 budget. That second condition is now quantifiable. The Register’s 2025 budget is €7,484,300, adopted by the Conference of Participants last October, so the financing threshold translates into €3,742,150 in combined assessed shares by (at least) first twenty-five ratifiers. Those figures do not guarantee speed, but they rebut the idea that the financial condition is unknowable. If capitals move briskly through signature and ratification over the next two or three quarters, entry into force in 2026 is plausible. The political question is not arithmetic; it is whether Major Contributors are ready to switch on Panels – and the budget implications that come with them – before a payout mechanism is in sight.

Conclusion: From Facts to Numbers

Where does this leave the larger accountability project? On balance, the draft is the right mechanism at the right moment. It converts a live evidence pipeline into a decision-making engine; it creates a forum that states can scale up or down without reopening the treaty; and it provides the legally credible outputs that innovative financing tools, like the EU’s proposed reparations loan, will need. Its shortcomings – the thin temporal baseline and the soft treatment of financing and enforcement – are products of the political economy of treaty-making, not of legal naiveté. They can be mitigated in implementation. The Assembly and Council should move quickly on the Rules: fix clear evidentiary and valuation standards; stage categories to meet claimant need and evidentiary readiness; adopt strong conflict and publication regimes; and set transparent criteria for Commissioner appointments. In parallel, the EU and G7 should continue to develop asset-based financing, with Commission awards serving as the legal benchmark that ties repayment to eventual Russian reparations.

The Commission cannot conjure money or guarantee Moscow’s cooperation. But it can do something only a treaty-based public body can credibly do: deliver principled, repeatable decisions at scale that translate injury into numbers the financial world can work with. If the law’s job here is to make facts count, this text – tightened in Rules and backed by smart financing – can get that job done.

A warm note of congratulations is due to all those involved in steering this process – especially the representatives of Ukraine, whose commitment and sacrifice have been instrumental in reaching this milestone.