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Strasbourg Gives Real Price in Chechnya
The European Court for Human Rights has ordered Russia to pay Khanbatay Khamidov a record sum for his losses from counterterrorist activities, ˆ172,000. Khamidov showed that the Interior Ministry forces practically destroyed his household, which included a business. The decision opens the way for a flood of similar suit, since only 350,000 rubles per family is being paid in Chechnya for the loss of housing and property.
Khamidov is a petroleum engineer by training who operated a bakery with his brother in the Nadterechny District of Chechnya. On their 1.2-hectare lot in the village of Bratskoe, they had two houses, a bakery, mill and warehouse. When local residents found out that troops were entering Nadterechny (where there had never been any military action) in 1999, many of them, including the Khamidov brother, fled into the woods. When the troops had gone and the local returned to their village, the Khamidov brother found themselves homeless because Russian special forces had taken over their property. They were forced to flee to a refugee camp with their wives and small children. His year-and-a-half-0ld nephew died of pneumonia in the camp.
Khamidov filed suit in a local court in 2001 to expel the special forces from his property. He won that suit, but he and his relatives returned to find their homes demolished and their equipment missing. He filed a complaint with the Strasbourg court that same year. The next year, Judge Lyudmila Lobova ruled in the Zamoskvoretsky Court in Moscow that the damage done was “not the fault of the Interior Ministry.” Khamidov appealed to the Court of Human Rights again in 2004 when he was unable to appeal that decision in Russian court.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 16, 2007
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Photo: Valery Melnikov
