Ruling on Katyn Killings Highlights Russia-Poland Rift

from the NY Times, Oct 21, 2013

Ruling on Katyn Killings Highlights Russia-Poland Rift

By ALAN COWELL and ANDREW ROTH

LONDON — In the long-simmering and emotional debate over a notorious mass killing during World War II, the European Court of Human Rightsruled Monday that Russia had failed to comply with its obligations to adequately investigate the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet secret police in 1940.

But the court said it had no jurisdiction over the massacre itself or the subsequent treatment of the relatives of the dead, prompting an outcry in Poland and expressions of satisfaction among officials in Moscow, underscoring the deep and lingering divisions inspired by the mass killing in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

“We are rather disappointed by this verdict,” said Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Artur Nowak-Far, according to Agence France-Presse. “The ruling does not take into account all the arguments of the Polish side that have here a great moral and historic right.”

Andrzej Melak, president of the Association of the Families of Katyn Victims, called the judgment “scandalous,” adding that it was “inadmissible and incomprehensible.”

“The failure to condemn this genocide and the impunity of its perpetrators led to it being repeated in Rwanda, the Balkans, and it will be repeated again,” he said. “Poles will not accept a ruling like this.”

But in Moscow, Georgy Matyushkin, the deputy minister of justice and Russia’s envoy to the European Court of Human Rights, told the Interfax news agency that the ruling showed that “the court does not have the conventional duty to investigate the events at Katyn” and that it would thus be “illogical” for it to address allegations of improper treatment of the victims’ relatives.

“The Russian authorities from the very beginning said that these events are located outside of the frame of the jurisdiction of the European court from the point of view of the time frame,” Mr. Matyushkin said. “And this point of view was accepted by the European court.”

The Polish prisoners, including nearly 5,000 senior Polish Army officers, disappeared in late 1939 and early 1940 during a period of German-Soviet cooperation, when Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland. In April and May 1940, they were taken to the Katyn woods, near Smolensk, west of Moscow, where they were executed and then buried in mass graves there and in two other villages.

After decades of denial, Russia admitted responsibility for the massacre in 1990 and opened a criminal investigation. The investigation was closed 14 years later, but much of its findings were classified and no one was publicly held responsible.

Relatives of the victims complained to the court in 2007 that the Russian inquiry had been ineffective and that the Russian authorities had displayed a dismissive attitude to requests for information about the event. The case was brought by 15 Polish citizens who are relatives of 12 victims of the massacre — police and army officers, an army doctor and a primary school headmaster — according to court filings.

The court’s highest panel, the Grand Chamber, ruled unanimously that “Russia had failed to comply with its obligation” under the European Convention on Human Rights to “furnish necessary facilities for examination of the case,” according to a statement from the court in Strasbourg, France.

But the ruling said the court had no jurisdiction to examine complaints over the killings themselves because the massacre took place a decade before the rights convention became international law and 58 years before Russia acceded to it, in 1998.

That period was too long for a “genuine connection” to be established between the killings and Russia’s accession to the convention, the ruling said. The court rejected an application for awarding damages.

The court also ruled that there had been no violation of the convention’s provision prohibiting inhuman or degrading treatment as it relates to the suffering of families of “disappeared” people. That part of the ruling overturned a lower court’s ruling in 2012, which found that that provision had been violated in the cases of 10 of the 15 Polish family members.

In its ruling, the Grand Chamber said Russia had not offered a “substantive analysis” for keeping the decision to close its investigation classified. “The court was unable to accept that the submission of a copy of the September 2004 decision could have affected Russia’s national security,” the ruling said.

Nikita V. Petrov, a historian for the Memorial human rights group, which has sought to declassify the decision, called the ruling a “light reprimand” that would do nothing to further the investigation.

“It’s like telling a criminal, ‘You haven’t behaved yourself very well,’ ” he said. “But it does not say that a crime is still taking place, because the government is hiding information about past criminal activities like the Katyn case.”

The massacre has continued to haunt Russian-Polish relations.

In April 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president and 95 other members of Poland’s political and military elite to a commemoration of the massacrecrashed over Smolensk, killing everyone on board. The crash led to mutual recriminations over an event intended to help heal the wound.

In November 2010, the Russian Parliament approved a statement holding Stalin and other Soviet leaders responsible for the Katyn killings.

Despite protests from Communist Parliament members, the State Duma acknowledged that archival material “not only unveils the scale of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders.”

Alan Cowell reported from London, and Andrew Roth from Moscow.