As we have reported earlier, husband and wife Mikhail and Marina Veselovskiy applied to the Committee against Torture claiming that they were subjected to an unmotivated assault by the traffic and patrol and point duty police staff.

The public investigation conducted by the Committee against Torture showed that investigator Burenkov from the Gorodetsk Interdistrict Investigation Department of the Investigation Committee under the RF Prosecutor’s office for Nizhny Novgorod region had refused to start criminal proceedings under the Veselovskiys’ application. This was an obviously unlawful decision and the Committee against Torture appealed against the decision to the Gorodetsk city court.  On 13.10.2008 the court found investigator Burenkov’s decision unfounded and unlawful, although Mr. Bovyrin, deputy prosecutor for Gorodets, was insisting throughout the hearing on behalf of the RF Prosecutor’s office (the only body in the RF supervising human rights protection) that the investigator’s decision was lawful and motivated.  The court also obliged the head of the Gorodetsk Interdistrict Investigation Department of the Investigation Committee to make good investigator Burenkov’s mistakes. The court also underlined that investigator Burenkov had failed to take the steps he had been ordered to take by his boss – head of the Gorodetsk Interdistrict Investigation Department of the Investigation Committee under the RF Prosecutor’s office for Nizhny Novgorod region. The court found the statement that Ms. Veselovskaya had committed an administrative offence unlawful because the statement was unfounded and not substantiated by the materials of the check.

It is still a secret how such a decision that, according to the court, does not correspond to the principle of lawfulness stipulated by the RF Constitution and violated Ms. Veselovskaya’s constitutional rights could be issued at all and why it was not cancelled by the head of    the  Gorodetsk Interdistrict Investigation Department of the Investigation Committee under the RF Prosecutor’s office for Nizhny Novgorod region, and why the prosecutor supervising the investigation failed to react to the violation.