Judgment concerning the Russian Federation
In the case of Zarema Musayeva and Others v. Russia the Court held that there had been violations of the right to life, of the right to prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, of the right to liberty and security, of the right to a fair trial and of the right to limitation on use of restrictions on rights of the European Convention.
The case concerned the wife of a former Chechen Supreme Court judge, who was forcibly removed by the police from her home in the Nizhniy Novgorod region in Russia and taken to Grozny in Chechnya, as well as her subsequent detention and the administrative and criminal proceedings brought against her there. It also concerned the ill-treatment that the applicant and her husband and daughter had been subjected to by the Chechen police, against the background of repeated public death threats against them by high-ranking Chechen officials, including the President.
The Court found that the Russian authorities, whose representatives had been the source of the death threats, had to have been aware of but had done nothing about the real and immediate risk to the lives of the applicant, her husband and their daughter. It also found that they had been illtreated by the Chechen police and that the applicant’s arrest and detention had been arbitrary and intended as retaliation against her family, who were involved in human-rights work and opposition activities in Chechnya.