ALEKSEY OVCHINNIKOV v. RUSSIA

• Judgment Date: 16 December 2010
• ECLI: ECLI:CE:ECHR:2010:1216JUD002406104
• Respondent State: Rusia
• Date: 16 December 2010
• Application Number: 24061/04
• Court: First Section (European Court of Human Rights)
• Counsel: MURASHCHENKO N.
• Applied Rules: 10

FIRST SECTION

CASE OF ALEKSEY OVCHINNIKOV v. RUSSIA

(Application no. 24061/04)

JUDGMENT

STRASBOURG

16 December 2010

FINAL

16/03/2011

This judgment has become final under Article 44 § 2 of the Convention. It may be subject to editorial revision.

In the case of Aleksey Ovchinnikov v. Russia,

The European Court of Human Rights (First Section), sitting as a Chamber composed of:

Christos Rozakis, President,
Nina Vajić,
Anatoly Kovler,
Elisabeth Steiner,
Khanlar Hajiyev,
Dean Spielmann,
Sverre Erik Jebens, judges,
and Søren Nielsen, Section Registrar,

Having deliberated in private on 25 November 2010,

Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that date:

PROCEDURE

1. The case originated in an application (no. 24061/04) against the Russian Federation lodged with the Court under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“the Convention”) by a Russian national, Mr Aleksey Yuryevich Ovchinnikov (“the applicant”), on 4 June 2004.

2. The applicant was represented by Ms N. Murashchenko, a lawyer practising in the Ivanovo region. The Russian Government (“the Government”) were represented by Mr P. Laptev, former Representative of the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights.

3. The applicant alleged a violation of his right to freedom of expression.

4. On 14 March 2006 the President of the First Section decided to give notice of the application to the Government. It was also decided to examine the merits of the application at the same time as its admissibility (Article 29 § 1).

THE FACTS

I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE CASE

5. The applicant was born in 1974 and lives in Ivanovo. He is a journalist writing for the Ivanovo-Press newspaper.

A. Publications about the events at the summer camp

6. In early July 2002 a nine-year-old boy attending the Stroitel summer camp complained to his parents that he had been beaten up and sexually abused by his twelve-year-old roommates. Further to a complaint by the boy's parents, the police found evidence of criminal offences which, however, were not prosecutable because the offenders were minors.

7. One of the offenders was the son of two federal judges, Mr and Mrs B. Another culprit was the stepgrandson of the deputy head of the Ivanovo Regional Traffic Police, Mr V.

8. As the offenders' parents held prominent positions in the region, the media took an intense interest in the story. The first article about the incident was published on 26 August 2002 by the Kursiv-Ivanovo weekly newspaper. The publication listed the names and positions of the offenders' relatives.

9. After the victim's mother had brought the police reports and the relevant medical records to the applicant's newspaper, the applicant undertook independent research into the events. In particular, he interviewed the principal of the Stroitel summer camp, several of its teachers, an official responsible for the supervision of summer camps in the region, a spokesman for the police department charged with the investigation and the head of the Judicial Qualifications Board.

10. On 3 September 2002 the applicant published an article about the incident at the summer camp in the Ivanovo-Press newspaper, under the headline “Day of reckoning” (Час расплаты). He wrote, in particular, as follows:

“Any story [of battery and sexual abuse] deserves the most rapt attention. This one is particularly shameful because of the fact that the parents of one little bastard work as judges in a district court, and a close relative of another is one of the heads of the regional traffic police.

It is hard to write about this matter. The case affects children, their lives, their tragedy and their future. It is hard because the guilt and its extent should be determined by a court, but the underage participants in this story are, alas, not liable to prosecution ... Their parents should be responsible for their deeds vis-à-vis society and the State. This is why we have decided to take the matter up ...

I believe readers will excuse me for not providing a detailed description of the abuse to which the kid was subjected (in fact, our colleagues from the Kursiv newspaper have already provided one). I will say only one thing: the circumstances of those unchildlish deeds were established by evidence. They amount to assault and battery, punishable by Article 116, and sexual assault, punishable by Article 132 of [the Criminal Code]. Thus, if those moral freaks had been charged with criminal offences and committed for trial, they would have risked long terms of imprisonment.

... [After the parents of the victim had complained to the police,] an investigation was conducted by officers from the Interior Department of the Teykovskiy District, who established that the actions of the three minor rapists indeed disclosed all the elements of criminal offences. However, no criminal proceedings were opened because the suspects were minors. Meanwhile, the press learned about the events and a scandal erupted.

It is not the first time that the attention of law-enforcement bodies has been riveted to the children of high-ranking parents. However, as a rule, such cases are abandoned at an early stage of the inquiry. Even when they are referred for trial, the general public hardly ever knows about it. Without any doubt, had the administration of the Stroitel summer camp paid attention to the facts and warned the parents in time, the investigators from [the Interior Department of the Teykovskiy District] would have hardly been allowed to go on with the investigation. The events were, however, left to take their course and were made public.

We must do some serious thinking here. How can it be? A kid whose parents work as JUDGES has committed a crime! Is it a coincidence or a pattern? What did his parents teach him? Perhaps they thought that the judge and the Law were one and the same thing, that the judge was not servant but master of the law, a superhuman? And that his children were superhumans, too; they could do whatever they pleased, in the knowledge that their mothers and fathers would exempt them from liability...

Another [offender] has a relative in the police force. Not an ordinary one, but a bigwig sporting star-studded epaulettes. So, is anything permitted? If something happened, would he 'cover up' and 'fix' it?

How will these people carry on working in the courts and the police force? Delivering judgments, sentencing men to prison terms for crimes for which their progeny could have been convicted? Or are they already used to doing this? After all, all these conjectures are based on real grounds and it is very likely that the case will be hushed up thanks to 'string pulling' by the rogues' parents.

We were told that pressure was being put on the victim's parents, that their physical integrity had been threatened. What is more, while our editorial board was working on that publication, we received a number of bizarre telephone calls asking us to stop the journalistic investigation and stay out of the way of the judges and their children. It is strange that none of the 'well-wishers' who called us considered the fate of the injured child, of how he will live after what happened. Nor did they consider the fate of the underage members of the 'criminal trio'. What will become of them? Could it be that, having gone unpunished once, they will resume their 'sexual experiments' in a couple of years? ...

...