Judge of the Khamovnichevsky District Court of Moscow Marina Filchenko satisfied the complaint of lawyer with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Sergey Babinets and obliged the Chief Investigative Directorate of the Russian Federation for Moscow to perform a check based on the fact of neglect of investigators and management of the Tverskoy District Investigative Department, who ignored the report of Anna Prokofyeva from Reutov about the police battery.
Previously we reported to have come across several appaling cases of illegal refusals of investigative departments of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation to perform a check of crime reports on applying physical force by the police officers. Things came to such a pitch that the investigators blatantly ignored the rulings of the Prosecutor’s Office and the judicial authorities, who demanded that they performed checks in accordance with the criminally-remedial law.
For example, the check based on the report of Anna Prokofyeva was not conducted by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for one year and two months. The check based on the crime report of Andrey Shatsky was not conducted by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for over two and a half years. Aminat Aliyeva awaited for conducting the check for over half a year: all this time her crime report was not considered by the investigator. Tamara Kuznetsova’s application was accepted by investigative authorities for proceedings only after a year. In addition, none of the submitted reports were registered in accordance with the law as crime reports.
Due to that on 8 December 2015 lawyers with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture submitted several crime reports to the Chief Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for Moscow. Human rights defenders detected constituent element of offence in the actions of the investigators unwilling to perform the check, under Article 293 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Neglect”). But these crime reports were also ignored by the investigative authorities. Complaints submitted to the superior authorities of the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor’s Office did not bring the result, so the human rights defenders had to submit a complaint to court against the inaction of the investigative authorities.
In its ruling, the copy of which human rights defenders received yesterday, the Khamovnichesky Court took the side of applicant Anna Prokofyeva. Judge Marina Filchenko pointed out that “the deputy head of the Investigative Department for the Chief Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Central Administrative District of Moscow refused to examine the crime report, having failed to appreciate any of the arguments provided by the applicant and giving no response to it».
Having declared such an answer illegal, the judge obliged the investigative authority to rectify the committed violation.
“At first we believed that we could solve the problem inside the department, however, the Investigative Directorate was strongly against conducting the check with regard to its subordinates, thus continuing the practice of violating the criminal and procedural legislation, – lawyer of the Moscow branch of the Committee Sergey Babinets commented. – Previously courts repeatedly pointed out to the district investigative departments on the necessity of strict observance of the law and now the court decided to remind about that to the district investigators who did not want to correct the mistakes of the their subordinates. At the present time we are preparing three more complaints, similar to the one we won, now in the interests of Andrey Shatsky, Aminat Aliyeva and Tamara Kuznetsova”.