On March 12 the European Court on Human Rights convicted the Russian Federation for violent disappearances of 13 persons in different districts of the Chechen Republic in the period from January 2001 to January 2003.
The applicants, residents of the Chechen settlements Urus-Martan and Tsotsi-Yurt, alleged that their relatives disappeared after being abducted by Russian servicemen. Nothing was known about them since and the domestic authorities failed to carry out an effective investigation into their allegations. They relied in particular on Articles 2 (right to life), 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment), 5 (right to liberty and security) and 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights
The case Dzhambekova and others concerns the disappearances of Rizvan Tatariev, Sharpudi Visaitov, Magomed Soltymuradov and Imran Dzhambekov. The four men have not been seen since they were abducted from their family homes in late 2001 and early 2002 by armed, masked men in camouflage uniforms. Since then the four families have been conducting a search for the four men together. In December 2002, two women-applicants were detained during a peaceful demonstration held on disappearances of their close relatives. During December 11-15, 2002, they were kept in awful conditions in the Gudermes ROVD.
The applicants in the case Elsiev and others are the relatives of eight young men who disappeared on September 2-7, 2002, in the village of Tsotsi-Yurt in the course of a large-scale special operation of Russian federal forces. The missing young men were Salakh Elsiev, Iskhadzi Demelkhanov, Ahmed Demilkhanov, Adam Boltiev, Lom-Ali Abubakarov, Ramzan Mandiev, Aslambek Agmerzaev and Dzhabrail Debishev. The authorities knew about the special operation in Tsotsi-Yurt, but denied the fact of detention of applicants’ relatives. The villagers have confirmed that the young men were detained by militaries and delivered to the filtration centre.
The case Khadaeva and others is connected with disappearance of Ali Khadaev, born in 1977, who was abducted from his family home in the early hours of 5 January 2003 by a group of armed men wearing camouflage uniforms. Since then, no news of him ever came.
In all three cases the Court considered that the applicants had presented a coherent and convincing picture of their relatives’ abduction, corroborated by witness statements.
The Court held in all three cases that the evidence available to it established beyond reasonable doubt that the applicants’ relatives had to be presumed dead following their unacknowledged detention by Russian servicemen during security operations. The Court came to these conclusions by drawing inferences from the Government’s failure to submit the documents from the investigation files which were in their exclusive possession or to provide another plausible explanation for the events in question.
In all three cases, the Court further held that there had been violations of Article 2 relating to the authorities’ failure to carry out effective investigations into the circumstances in which the applicants’ relatives had disappeared; Article 3 relating the manner in which the complaints had been dealt with by the authorities; Article 5, which constituted a particularly grave violation of the right to liberty and security enshrined in that article.
Additional information: The total sum of payments awarded under these claims by the Strasbourg Court makes over 293,000 euros. The total awarded compensations amounted to 522,000 euros.
