Government gives no comments on European Court ruling

The press service of the Russian government has refused to give comments on the 14 July ruling of the European Court of Human Rights concerning six residents of Chechnya. "We have no comments, we are not informed of the problem," a spokesman for the Russian government said to the Caucasian Knot correspondent.

"The task on the European Court is not to correct single mistakes of national courts but to raise national legal and judicial systems up to the European level," says Aleksandr Cherkasov, a representative of the Human Rights Center Memorial - the organization that represented the applicants in Strasbourg. "And from this point of view the role of the state is great. When the judgement of the European Court is made, the state should change the consideration of specific cases and the work of the state machine so as to avoid such applications in the future. One can change the state machine or legal mechanism. Or one can put pressure on the applicants so as to make them withdraw their applications from Strasbourg. In recent years, several applicants have been killed or gone missing under circumstances proving the involvement of federal security agencies."

On 14 July, the ECHR denied a request of the Russian government to send to retrial to the Grand Chamber of the Court judgments on the applications of six residents of Chechnya whose relatives were killed or suffered in purges or in an air strike on a column of refugees. "Thus the judgments of the European Court have come into force," said Kirill Koroteyev, a Memorial lawyer.