European Court Agrees to Hear Chechens’ Suits Against Russians

STRASBOURG: The European Court of Human Rights said Thursday it had agreed for the first time to hear lawsuits brought by Chechens accusing the Russian army of executions, torture and rights violations in Chechnya.

The landmark announcement paves the way for six Chechen plaintiffs to plead the case that Moscow violated their rights in the breakaway republic, where Russian forces have been battling separatist militants for years.

A registrar for the court, Roderick Liddell, said that more than 100 complaints were still being investigated for suitability but that six had been deemed worthy of a hearing in the Strasbourg court.

Human rights groups have regularly accused both Russian forces and Chechen militants of numerous rights violations in Chechnya, where tens of thousands of people have been killed.

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch described Russia's war in Chechnya as Europe's most intense human rights crisis, citing "continuing atrocities" such as arbitrary detentions, disappearances of civilians and sexual abuse at the hands of troops.

Two plaintiffs claim that members of their family were tortured and summarily executed by Russian soldiers in the Chechen capital of Grozny in January 2000.

Three are filing suit over the "indiscriminate of civilians fleeing Grozny" in October 1999. The sixth charges Russia with killing his son and three nieces in the bombing of Katir Yurt village in February 2000.

Lawyers for the Russian government had argued that the plaintiffs failed to exhaust all domestic avenues for addressing their complaints, but the court said Moscow's objection was "closely linked to the merits of the complaints." Russian authorities investigated all six of the plaintiffs' cases, but none resulted in a conviction or in the identification of the responsible parties.

Russian troops have maintained a precarious hold on Chechnya since they were sent into the Caucasus republic in October 1999 to put down a separatist insurgency. There are currently an estimated 80,000 in the republic.

Thursday's announcement came on the same day that a Moscow court began hearing lawsuits brought by victims of an October theatre hostage-taking in downtown Moscow by Chechen militants.

In a first such lawsuit, the victims are seeking millions of dollars for emotional and physical suffering from city authorities.

Some 800 theatre-goers were held for three days by Chechen separatists in October, and 129 of them were killed in the crisis, most from the effects of a powerful gas pumped into the theatre by Russian special troops to subdue the hostage-takers before a pre-dawn raid.

In its 2002 annual report, Human Rights Watch criticized the raid for "failing to respect the laws of war." The European Court of Human Rights was established in 1959. It handles alleged violations of the 1950 European convention on human rights.