Furkat Tishaev: compensation claims of residents of Kalmykia to ECtHR for years of repressions have no prospects

Plenty of Kalmykia residents are now receiving decisions of the Evropeisky Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) stating that their complaints to the refusal of Russian authorities to compensate the moral harm suffered by them in the years of repression are non-eligible for the court.

Since summer and by November 2012, over 2700 letters were sent from Kalmykia to Strasbourg. The complaints had to do with the refusal of Russian authorities to compensate the moral harm suffered by them or their relatives in the years of political repressions in the Soviet era of the 1930s and 1940s.

Arthur Byurchiev, a resident of the village of Troitskoe in Kalmykia, has received a letter from Strasbourg, informing him that "the ECtHR after sitting in the period from November 27, 2012, to December 13, 2012... decided to declare your complaint inadmissible."

Similar letters arrived to his wife Galina Byurchieva and other 106 residents of Kalmykia.

Furkat Tishaev, an expert in running cases at the ECtHR and a senior lawyer of the HRC "Memorial" reminds that residents of Kalmykia had been warned that their claims had no prospects from the beginning; and that decisions of the ECtHR passed earlier on similar claims lodged by residents of the former Soviet Union could not be considered as precedents for Russia.