licting accounts of events, the Court is inevitably confronted when establishing the facts with the same difficulties as those faced by any first-instance court. When, as in the instant case, the respondent Government have exclusive access to information able to corroborate or refute the applicant's allegations, any lack of cooperation by the Government without a satisfactory explanation may give rise to the drawing of inferences as to the well-foundedness of the applicant's allegations (see {Tanis} and Others v. Turkey, No. 65899/01, § 160, ECHR 2005-VIII). As to the facts that are in dispute, the Court reiterates its jurisprudence requiring the standard of proof "beyond reasonable doubt" in its assessment of evidence (see {Avsar} v. Turkey, No. 25657/94, § 282, ECHR 2001-VII (extracts)). Such proof may follow from the coexistence of sufficiently strong, clear and concordant inferences or of similar unrebutted presumptions of fact. In this context, the conduct of the parties when evidence is being obtained has to be taken into account (see {Tanis} and Others, cited above, § 160).
53. The Court is sensitive to the subsidiary nature of its role and recognises that it must be cautious in taking on the role of a first-instance tribunal of fact, where this is not rendered unavoidable by the circumstances of a particular case (see, for example, McKerr v. the United Kingdom (dec.), No. 28883/95, 4 April 2000). Nonetheless, where allegations are made under Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention, the Court must apply a particularly thorough scrutiny (see, mutatis mutandis, Ribitsch v. Austria, 4 December 1995, § 32, Series A No. 336; and {Avsar}, cited above, § 283) even if certain domestic proceedings and investigations have already taken place.
54. In the present case, the Court observes that although the Government denied the State's responsibility for the killing of the applicant's husband, they acknowledged that Mr Lecha Khazhmuradov had died as a result of murder committed by armed men on 11 September 2000. It has therefore to be established whether the armed men belonged to the federal forces.
55. In this connection, the Court observes that it is clear from the parties' submissions that the incident of 11 September 2000 was witnessed by at least four persons. Two of them, Mr A. and Mr K., made written statements submitted by the applicant to the Court, whilst two others, Mr E. and Mr Lit., as well as Mr A., gave oral evidence to the investigating authorities, as indicated by the Government. All the eyewitnesses consistently held that on 11 September 2000 at about 4 p.m. they had come under indiscriminate machine-gun fire by Russian servicemen who had arrived in two armoured personnel carriers, and that those servicemen had then shot dead the applicant's husband (see paragraphs 10 and 19 - 21 above).
56. The Government did not dispute the circumstances of the incident as submitted by eyewitnesses, and, more specifically, the fact that the alleged perpetrators had arrived at, and left, the scene of the incident in two armoured personnel carriers. Moreover, the Government referred to a report on the inspection of the scene of the incident which, according to them, attested the presence of the tyre tracks of a motor vehicle, presumably an armoured personnel carrier (see paragraph 17 above). The Government also referred to the witness statements of a certain serviceman, L., to the effect that on 11 September 2000 at about 6 p.m. two armoured personnel carriers with obscured registration numbers had passed through a check-point on the road leading from Goyskoye to Urus-Martan (see paragraph 23 above). The Court, unlike the Government, does not consider that the alleged discrepancy between the time of the murder indicated by the eye-witnesses and the time the armoured personnel carriers passed through the check-point indicated by serviceman L. casts doubt on the reliabi
> 1 2 3 ... 6 7 8 ... 12 13 14
Zaki.ru законы и право
поиск по сайту
каталог документов
добавить сайт Zaki.ru в избранное
Правовые акты международные
Правовые акты Российской Федерации
