inverni,
George Nicolaou, judges,
and {Soren} Nielsen, Section Registrar,
Having deliberated in private on 19 March 2009,
Delivers the following judgment, which was adopted on that date:
PROCEDURE
1. The case originated in an application (No. 15336/02) 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 Eduard Nikolayevich Chistyakov ("the applicant"), on 16 March 2002.
2. 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. On 20 January 2006 the Court decided to give notice of the application to the Government. Under the provisions of Article 29 § 3 of the Convention, it decided to examine the merits of the application at the same time as its admissibility.
4. The Government objected to the joint examination of the admissibility and merits of the application. Having considered the Government's objection, the Court dismissed it.
THE FACTS
I. The circumstances of the case
5. The applicant was born in 1952 and lives in the town of Kamyshin in the Volgograd Region.
A. First round of proceedings
6. The applicant was employed as an expert in the local Forensic Examinations Service. In 2000 he was accused of having been negligent in the discharge of his professional duties and was dismissed from his post. In March 2001 he was charged with having given a deliberately false expert opinion.
7. On 30 May 2001 the Kamyshin Town Court of the Volgograd Region convicted the applicant as charged and sentenced him to one year of correctional labour coupled with a fine amounting to 20% of his income. Under the Amnesty Act 2000 the applicant was absolved from serving his sentence.
8. On 7 August 2001 the Volgograd Regional Court overturned the judgment and discontinued the proceedings for want of corpus delicti. The court held that the offence required express malice, which had not been established on the facts of the case. The Rules on the Forensic Medical Examination of Corpses allowed the expert to determine the scope and methods of examination on the basis of ministerial instructions. The applicant's failure to conduct a thorough corpse examination resulted from having chosen "the wrong scope and methods".
B. Supervisory review and second round of proceedings
9. On a supervisory request from the Volgograd Region Acting Prosecutor, on 21 September 2001 the Presidium of the Regional Court quashed both judgments for insufficient substantiation and remitted the case to the prosecutor for a new investigation. It held as follows:
"Ruling on the discontinuation of the case, the [appeal] court referred to the Rules on forensic examination of corpse, annexed to the Decree 407 of 10 December 1996... According to paragraph 1.11 of the Rules, "the scope and method of the expert examination of a corpse is determined by the expert, taking account of the aim and objectives of the examination, the requirements of substantiation and objectivity of the expert's conclusions, directions of the normative instructions and guidelines."
So, the appeal court ruled that the insufficiency of the corpse examination carried out by the applicant... had been due to his wrong choice as regards the scope and method of examination...
[T]he case file did not contain all normative documents regarding the process of an expert examination.
The investigating authority and the court concluded that [the applicant] had acted in gross disregard of the above Rules, only on the basis of excerpts from these
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