Chechnya’s Supreme Court upholds the refusal to investigate the kidnapping of a person by his relatives

The Supreme Court of Chechnya recognized as legitimate the refusal of the Investigative Committee to investigate the girl’s abduction by her relatives, from whom she tried to escape. The Insider was informed about this in the Russian LGBT Network.

The Supreme Court of the Republic recognized the actions of the investigator as legal and not requiring verification. Earlier, the investigation refused to accept the statement about the abduction of the girl, stating that the human rights defender does not have the authority to file a statement, and only the relatives, who abducted the girl, have the right to do so.

In fact, according to the lawAnyone who has learned about the crime can file a complaint about the abduction, human rights activists emphasize.

“If we talk about the rights of LGBT people, a pathological situation has developed in Chechnya, when relatives are not only not ready to be applicants, but also act as violators of human rights themselves. So in many cases, human rights defenders who become aware of crimes, including enforced disappearances, are the only ones who file complaints with the police, ”says human rights activist Veronika Lapina, who works with the Russian LGBT Network.

The kidnapping took place in August 2020. A native of Grozny contacted the hotline of human rights defenders with a request for help in leaving the republic. The girl said that her relatives found out about her non-traditional sexual orientation, and now her life is in danger.

Human rights activists were able to help the girl to leave the house, but her relatives wrote a statement about the abduction. Three days later, riot police broke into the shelter where the girl was with the volunteers, and everyone in the shelter was taken to the Staropromyslovsky police department in Grozny. After the interrogation, the relatives took the girl away by force in an unknown direction, and the female volunteers who helped her were beaten and tortured with electric shock for several days.

After the incident, the head of the Emergency Assistance program of the Russian LGBT Network, David Isteyev, filed a counter statement on the fact of the girl’s abduction by the security forces to the Investigative Committee. The Investigative Committee responded only 3 months later, saying that they refuse to carry out an inspection on the fact of the girl’s abduction, “since there is a clear discrepancy with the reality of the circumstances.” This refusal was appealed to the Supreme Court of Chechnya.

“The human rights defender was deprived of the opportunity and the right to be a complainant about a crime. That is, even if he sees that a crime is being committed and makes a statement, no one will check. After all, his interests are not affected by this crime. In this case, everything is complicated by the fact that the statement was written against the girl’s relatives, whose interests, according to the court, are precisely affected by this statement, ”says lawyer Alexander Nemov, who filed the complaint.

It should be noted that this is not the only case of the lack of reaction of the Chechen law enforcement agencies to the abduction of people with non-traditional sexual orientation in Chechnya. So, at the beginning of June this year, a similar situation repeated with Halimat Taramova. The girl said that she ran away from her home in Grozny, fleeing the beatings because of her sexual orientation. She was in a Dagestan apartment for women who had been subjected to domestic violence, but the security forces broke into it and forcibly took her out. Later, the Chechen TV channel aired a special report about the “attempted abduction” of Khalimat Taramova, in which she claims that she does not remember anything.

The Insider investigated several more cases of kidnapping and murder of Chechen homosexuals.