Today, on 17 December 2019, the European Court of Human Rights passed a ruling on the case of Husein Badurgov who went missing in the Chechen Republic in 2012. The Strasbourg judges established that the Russian authorities violated the article of the European Convention guaranteeing the right to life and the effective investigation. With regard to this, the court awarded 26000 euro to Husein’s mother as a compensation.
As we have previously reported, in July 2012, Husein Badurgov together with his young wife and a seven-months old daughter moved from Ingushetia to Grozny in order to get a job. On 10 July at about 9 a.m. Husein called his sister Petimat and told her that he intended to go to a job interview to one of the Grozny shops. After the job interview he called again and started to tell about its results. At that time Petimat heard some man addressing Husein, and after that the communication broke. She started to call her brother back, but no one answered. Since that time Husein never made contact. All subsequent attempts of his relatives to find him of obtain information about his whereabouts were in vain.
On the next day Husein’s father filed an application about his missing son in the District Department of the Interior of the Zavodsky District of Grozny. A day later Husein’s relatives applied to the Investigative Committee.
The criminal case based on the fact of the person’s missing was opened only two months after, which prevented from necessary investigative activities at the initial, most important, stage of the investigation. Later on, the investigators time after time suspended the criminal case, without having performed the necessary actions, many of which have already lost their value by now. For example, all possible witnesses in case were not questioned, the subscribers who talked to Badurgov over the phone were not established or questioned as witnesses, it was not established whether Badurgov was in the territory of Ingushetia on the day of his disappearance, taking into account that his phone was detected on that day at Nesterovskaya village of the Sunzhensky District of the Republic of Ingushetia. These and many other drawbacks in the course of the investigation were repeatedly pointed out by the Scientific Investigation Division and by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Chechen republic, but they have never been rectified.
Considering the investigation of this case to be ineffective, on 5 April 2016 human rights defenders submitted a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in the interests of Husein’s mother, Madnyat Dyshneyeva.
At the present time, the investigative authorities failed both to identify the whereabouts of Husein and find the persons involved in his disappearance. The criminal case is once more suspended.
Today, the European Court of Human Rights passed a ruling on the complaint in the interests of Madnyat Dyshneyeva. The Strasbourg judges unanimously established that Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights (“right to life”) has been violated due to the fact that the Russian authorities failed to conduct an effective investigation of Husein Badurgov’s disappearance. With regard to this, the court awarded Ms Dyshneyeva a compensation of 26000 euro.
“From the very start, Madnyat Dyshneyeva and her relatives pointed at possible involvement of state authorities to Husein’s disappearance. However, the investigative bodies never performed any effective measures for checking this information, – lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Ekaterina Vanslova comments on today’s ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. – The Court also pointed out that the investigators ignored the instructions of their superiors with regard to the case, having failed to perform elementary investigative activities. That is why the investigation performed at the national level was predictably declared non-effective”.