The applicants

146. The applicants asserted that the sudden reversal of the position of the Russian authorities which had occurred at some point in 2004 and had entailed the transformation of the dead Katyn victims into “disappeared persons” amounted, on its own, to inhuman and degrading treatment, especially when the advanced age of all the applicants but one was taken into account. An additional element contributing to the applicants’ suffering had been the authorities’ unjustified denial of access to the documents in case no.159 which could shed light on the fate of their relatives, both at the domestic level and in the proceedings before the Court (here they referred to the Court’s findings to the same effect in the case of Imakayeva v. Russia, no. 7615/02, § 165, ECHR 2006‑XIII (extracts)).

147. The applicants’ expectations and hopes of having the circumstances of the Katyn massacre elucidated had been further dashed by the Russian courts’ decisions declaring that it had not been established what had happened to their relatives after they had been placed “at the disposal” of the NKVD. Those findings represented a sheer denial of the basic historical facts and were tantamount to informing a group of relatives of Holocaust victims that the victims must be considered unaccounted for as their fate could only be traced to the dead-end track of a concentration camp because the documents had been destroyed by the Nazi authorities.

148. The applicants believed that the reaction of the Russian institutions to their requests for the rehabilitation of their relatives also contained elements of degrading treatment. The Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office and the Moscow courts had refused their requests, claiming that it was impossible to determine the specific legal provisions governing the execution of Polish prisoners of war. Reliance on such grounds implied and even suggested that there might have been good reasons for the executions and that the victims might have been criminals who deserved capital punishment. This was to be considered highly offensive and degrading to the applicants.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1009