SOYUPOVA v. RUSSIA
Inadmissible
Alena Poláčková;Branko Lubarda;Dmitry Dedov;Helen Keller;Helena Jäderblom;Luis López Guerra;Pere Pastor Vilanova
1. The applicant, Ms Sanet Soyupova, is a Russian national, who was born in 1944 and lives in Zakan-Yurt, a village in the Chechen Republic. summarised as follows. 3. The applicant is a Chechen. In 1944, during the Second World War, the USSR State Defence Committee issued a decree (Постановление ГОКО № -5073сс от 31 января 1944 г.) by which it ordered the deportation of her family and other Chechens to a special settlement in the Kazakh Soviet Republic and placed them under police surveillance. In 1956 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR allowed the deportees out of exile, but banned them from returning to their homeland and ruled out the return of confiscated property. In 1958 the applicant left the special settlement. 4. In 1991, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia passed the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Persecution (Закон “О реабилитации жертв политических репрессий”), whose preamble provided for the rehabilitation of victims and compensation for material damage and personal suffering. 5. In 2005 the mention of personal suffering was removed from the preamble. 6. In 2008 the applicant was recognised as a victim of Soviet political and ethnic persecution and in 2014 she sued the State for 5,000,000 Russian roubles (RUB) (about 98,000 euros) in damages for the suffering she had undergone in her childhood. 7. On 13 March 2015 the Achkhoy-Martan District Court dismissed her claim. The applicant appealed to the Supreme Court of the Chechen Republic. Relying on Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, she argued that the Law had given her a “legitimate expectation” of redress. 8. On 16 June 2015 the Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the lower court, considering that the applicant had had no legitimate expectation: the Law had not provided for compensation for people who had been deported as they had not been “deprived of their liberty” within the meaning of section 15; the Law had made no promise of damages for personal suffering, nor could such damages be awarded under the Civil Code because the Code had introduced the notion of personal suffering into Russian law long after the persecution had taken place. 9. At the heart of the present case lie differences between two versions of the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Persecution: the original version (18 October 1991) and the one in force at the time of the applicant’s claim (30 November 2011). “This Law aims to rehabilitate all victims of political persecution ... and to compensate them ... for their material damage and personal suffering.” “This Law aims to rehabilitate all victims of political persecution ... and to compensate them ... for their material damage.” “Those who have been persecuted by way of deprivation of liberty and rehabilitated ... shall be paid RUB 180 per month of captivity, but no more than RUB 25,000 ...” “Those who have been persecuted by way of deprivation of liberty or forced psychiatric custody and rehabilitated ... shall be paid RUB 75 per month of captivity ... but no more than RUB 10,000.” 10. Article 4 § 1 of the Civil Code of 1994 reads: “Provisions of civil legislation shall have no retroactive effect and shall be applied to legal relationships which have arisen after [the provisions] have entered into force ...” 11. On 24 September 2012 the Constitutional Court found the 2011 version of section 15 of the Law compatible with the Constitution and confirmed that the compensation mentioned in the Law aimed to provide redress for the most severe acts of political persecution, that is, imprisonment and forced psychiatric custody (judgment 1765-O).