European Court: Russia to pay 38,000 euros for disappearances in Chechnya

The European Court for Human Rights has passed a decision on the case "Takhaev et al. versus Russia", where the Russian Federation was found guilty of violent disappearance of a 20-years-old men in Chechnya in November 2002. The Court has decided on the compensation for the applicants for their material and moral damage in the sum of 38,000 euros.

Ayub Takhaev was detained on November 13, 2002, in his house in Mesker-Yurt village in Chechnya. On the following day power agents detained two more residents of the village - Viskhadzhi Magamadov and Hasan Mezhiev, and on November 15, 2002, Adam Ilyasov was also detained. After the detention of Ayub and three other men, nobody had ever heard of them since. Relatives of Viskhadzhi, Hasan and Adam have also applied to the Court, and decisions are now anticipated on all three cases.

The organization named "Legal Initiative for Russia" reports that the Court has criticised the inefficient investigation of the circumstances of Ayub's disappearance. The Court remarked that for the first time the witnesses were interrogated only in 2007, i.e., 5 years after the incident. Besides, it looks like the investigation failed to interrogate the law enforcers and militaries at all, and the authorities had taken no serious steps to establish the whereabouts and fate of Ayub Takhaev.

The Court has established that in relation to Ayub Takhaev the right to life was violated; the victim should be regarded perished, while Russian authorities had failed to conduct an efficient investigation into the fact of disappearance. The Court also has recognized that Ayub Takhaev had been detained illegally. The European Court has ruled that the attitude of state bodies to applicants' complaints was inhuman treatment, and the applicants had been deprived of efficient means of legal defence against violations.

On October 2, 2008, the Court will pass its decisions on three other cases on disappearances in Chechnya.