CASE OF ZAVORIN v. RUSSIA
Violation of Article 5 - Right to liberty and security (Article 5-3 - Length of pre-trial detention;Reasonableness of pre-trial detention)
Dmitry Dedov;Erik Møse;Khanlar Hajiyev
4. The applicant was born in 1976 and lives in Kemerovo. 5. On 1 March 2008 the applicant was arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily injuries to Mr K. On 3 March 2008 the Tsentralnyy District Court of Kemerovo remanded him in custody. 6. On 10 October 2008 the applicant and other persons were charged with running of a criminal syndicate, extortion and other offences. On 18 March 2010 the case was sent for trial to the Kemerovo Regional Court. 7. On 28 May 2013 the Kemerovo Regional Court, further to a verdict by a jury, found the applicant guilty and sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment. 8. On 11 February 2014 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation quashed the conviction and remitted the case for a new trial. It decided that the applicant should stay in custody: “Zavorin, P[.], K[.], Sp[.] and Sl[.] stand accused of serious and particularly serious offences. Having regard to the gravity of the charges and the information on their character which is available in the case materials, the court considers that the grounds listed in paragraph 1 of Article 97 of the Code of Criminal Procedure are present. The information about the case, taken in its entirety, gives reason to consider that, if the above individuals were to be released from custody, they might abscond and thereby prevent the case from being examined within a reasonable time (the time the proceedings before the first-instance court have already taken should not be discounted) or they might influence the witnesses or victims. Under these circumstances, the court considers that these individuals must be placed into custody for a period of three months”. 9. On 28 April 2014 the Kemerovo Regional Court returned the case to the prosecutor so that certain procedural defects could be remedied. It also extended the applicant’s and other defendants’ detention for a further three months, referring mainly to the gravity of the charges but also to the wording of the Supreme Court’s decision of 11 February 2014. In so far as the applicant sought to rely on the Government’s admission of a violation, the Regional Court held as follows: “The defendant A. L. Zavorin filed an application for release on an undertaking to appear and to be of good conduct, relying on the fact that his prolonged detention in the present proceedings was deemed to be unjustified in the framework of the proceedings on his application before the European Court of Human Rights and that the [Russian] Government offered him compensation ... which he refused ... A. L. Zavorin [and another co-defendant] submitted documents concerning the examination of their applications by the European Court of Human Rights which are in English; they are not translated into Russian or properly certified. The document in Russian which A. L. Zavorin submitted is not certified either. The court is not competent to translate the documents which the parties submitted ... Having regard to the number and nature of the offences imputed to Sp[.], P[.], A. L. Zavorin and St[.] and the public danger they represent, the information on their character, the particular complexity of the criminal case, the time that the remedying of the defects and a subsequent trial will take, the court considers that their detention must be extended for a further three months, until 28 July 2014.” 10. On 28 July 2014 the senior investigator of the Investigations Committee ordered the applicant’s release, noting that he had spent in custody more than seventy-six months, whereas the Code of Criminal Procedure set the maximum duration of pre-trial detention at eighteen months.