Human rights court to hear Chechens' cases against Russia

MOSCOW -- The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday announced that it will hear six cases filed by Chechens alleging abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya, including executions and torture.

The cases, stemming from 1999 and 2000, the early months of the second Russian military campaign against Chechen rebels, allege that plaintiffs' relatives were tortured and killed.

They also allege that Russian warplanes indiscriminately bombed civilians fleeing the republic's capital Grozny and that troops destroyed civilian property, according to a statement from the court, based in Strasbourg, France.

Chechens and human-rights activists say Russian troops commit abuses with impunity during "clean-up operations" in which communities are sealed off and soldiers search for suspected rebels.

Many Russian officials resent such complaints, and the Kremlin-backed human rights ombudsman for Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said the court's decision was an attempt to put political pressure on Russia.

"Unfortunately, some officials in the Council of Europe make a political game out of regular court deliberations," Sultygov was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax. The Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights body, oversees the court.

But Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the legislative committee of the Russian parliament's lower house, said "the court is a much better method of self-protection than taking up a submachine gun."

"It is pretty well-known that the rights of our citizens, both Chechens and our soldiers, are being violated in Chechnya," Interfax quoted him as saying.

Over the past day, seven Russian servicemen were killed in rebel attacks on military outposts and when an armored personnel carrier was blown up, an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said Thursday, on condition of anonymity.

Although the Russian military outweighs the rebels in manpower and equipment, reports come almost daily of insurgents killing Russians in small attacks and ambushes.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Grozny and at least three other towns to protest police sweeps and arrests.

Russian troops left Chechnya in 1996 after rebels fought them to a standstill in a 20-month war, but returned in September 1999 after Chechnya-based insurgents made incursions into neighboring Dagestan and after some 300 people were killed in apartment bombings that officials blamed on the rebels.