| On 3 May 2007 the European Court of Human Rights notified the NN Committee Against Torture that on 10 April 2007 the Court had received observations of the Russian Federation concerning the just satisfaction which had been claimed by representatives of the applicant under the case “Lisina v. Russia”. You may remember that the NN Committee Against Torture had carried out a public investigation into Ms. Lisina’s allegations. She had stated that she had been beaten and raped by officials of the Nizhegorodsky District Prosecutor’s Office in the course of interrogation. For many years lawyers of the Committee has been granting legal aid to the girl, including her representation before the European Court. According to the observations, submitted to the Court, the Russian Federation is adamant to admit that it has violated the applicant’s rights. If the Court decides otherwise, 100,000 euros claimed in compensation is at any rate an excessive sum, as the state’s representatives believe. Besides, the representatives of the state informed the Court that legal proceedings concerning ill-treatment of the applicant by law enforcement officers were still pending at a domestic level. The Russian Federation also submitted that the applicant’s complaints against ill-treatment had been thoroughly investigated (including forensic medical examinations), but domestic courts had considered the results of the investigation as insufficient to conduct a trial on the merits. The state’s representatives are convinced that if the Court acknowledges a violation of the Convention by the Russian Federation, the adequate satisfaction to the applicant will be the mere acknowledgement of the violation. It should be mentioned that one week after the observations had been submitted, a local domestic court (the Nizhegorodsky District Court) adopted a decision in which it upheld the discontinuation of the criminal case in respect of Ms. Lisina’s complaint as lawful, and revoked the decision of Mr. S.D. Belov, a deputy prosecutor of Nizhny Novgorod Region, which quashed the decision to discontinue criminal proceeding under the case as unlawful. It means that the case, which has been pending for almost eight years already, is again discontinued for an indefinite time. Probably, this should be understood as pending proceedings at a domestic level. |
News
03 May 2007