Experts state illegal restriction of citizens' rights after putting them on operative lists

The restriction of citizens' rights in connection with putting them onto operative lists is illegal and may be appealed against in the court, said experts in their comments on the detention of rights defender Stanislav Dmitrievsky in the KBR.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on December 27, Stanislav Dmitrievsky, the executive director of the "Russian-Chechen Friendship Society", who was returning from Chechnya to Nizhny Novgorod as a member of the Joint Mobile Group, was detained for three hours at the federal checkpoint in the KBR. According to his story, law enforcers referred to the fact that he "was listed in some database as a person, who should be checked."

According to Anton Ryzhov, a lawyer of the Committee against Torture (CaT) and an expert on international law, there are already several decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), including on claims from Russia, on unreasonable putting people into operative databases.

As noted by Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the Information-Analytical Centre "Sova", putting citizens into operative lists is "quite common in Russia." According to his story, because the absence of specific legislation, decisions of the ECtHR are "ineffective" in Russia.

After the ECtHR's decision, Russia was supposed to create some mechanism that would allow a person to appeal against his or her placement into some operative list, Mr Verkhovsky has emphasized.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.