Moscow- A European human rights court decision against Russia for injuries and killings of civilians in Chechnya got little news coverage in Russia Friday. But for Petima Goygova,one of three women who filed the winning cases with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR,) the ruling was a source of comfort after the 2000 murder of her mother and brother in Chechnya, when Russian forces seized control of the capital Grozny.
"Europe has decided the Russians are wrong," she rejoiced during a telephone interview from a small town near the French border in Belgium where she now lives.
The ECHR heard her case and those of two other women who were in Grozny at the time, ruling on Thursday that Russia must pay a fine of 95,000 euros (135,000 dollars) for the execution and injury of unarmed civilians by Russian soldiers.
"In Russia I could not find protection, but in Belgium they listened," Goygova, 41, said.
She first heard the news of the judgement on Radio Free Europe.
"I only had time to hear them say 'guilty,' but I was so happy," she said.
However, in Russia, the news was largely absent from the airwaves.
"If cases regarding Chechnya are reported in the media, it is fairly limited to reporting on fact," said Ole Salvang, executive director of the Russia Justice Initiative (RJI), which brought Goygova's case before the ECHR.
"There is no wider discussion about how these abuses could have happened and who could be held responsible," he noted.
The non-governmental group providing legal assistance from Moscow and Ingushetia currently has around 120 Chechen cases pending with the ECHR. The referrals occur only after all domestic recourse has been exhausted.
Goygova's tragic story was the ninth RJI case before the Strasbourg-based court, out of a total of 18 Chechen cases won there. All told, more than 9,000 cases involving Russia are pending at the court, far more than from any other country.
"But this is only the beginning for us," said Salvang. "We then take the judgement to the Russian authorities and urge them to investigate."
The killings were so painful for Goygova that she left Ingushetia because she "would have felt .. alone" there, and because "the war killed the soul of the people."
On January 19, 2000, Goygova entered Chechnya from neighbouring Ingushetia to hunt for her 59-year-old mother, who had refused to relocate after the first Chechen war began in 1994.
Following eyewitness accounts of a "bloodied old lady wearing a sheep skin" that resembled the one Goygova had sewn for her mother, she walked from check-point to hospitals, finally facing soldiers at a blockade in the centre of Grozny.
There was one man among the soldiers whom she knew from childhood.
"I won't forget his face. He killed my mother," she said with certainty.
"He threatened me with his automatic, arguing about letting me pass ... The whole time my mother's body was lying 50 metres behind him," she said.
Three men, including her brother, had tried to take her mother out of Grozny in a handcart but had been stopped by soldiers, who beat them and shot her mother in the abdomen and head, according to a statement by the ECHR.
Two weeks later, Goygova found her brother's body with an ear sawn off. "I was in shock," said Goygova. "I had to leave."
More than 50 civilians died between December 1999 and January 2000 in Chechnya, according to Human Rights Watch.
Since it began hearing cases in 2005, the ECHR has been inundated with appeals from Russian citizens, who say that Russian courts are ignoring allegations of torture, murder and other war crimes.
In December 2006, Russian lawmakers voted against ratification of a key reform document - protocol 14 - aimed at speeding up procedures at the court, making Russia the only country not to have done so.
Russian officials view the European court as biassed, and President Vladimir Putin has condemned "the politicization of court decisions."
"It's not acceptable that this organization is used for attacks against the Russian Federation," Sergei Baburin, Duma deputy and head of Russia's nationalist Rodina party, said earlier this year.
Only Russian cases that occurred after 1999, when Russia became a signatory, can be admitted to the European court. In addition, the Russians must have opened an investigation into the abuses in question.
The cases before the court on Thursday were a good example of the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya's influence. Prosecutors investigated the murders only after she published articles about them, Salvang said.
This Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of Politkovskaya's killing in Moscow.
"She was an angel," Goygova said. "I hope god takes to account whomever it was who killed her."
