102 Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January – June 2007 Rights and her family. Early one morning in March 2006, several military servicemen dressed in camouflage uniforms and wearing masks seized the son of Fatima Giseeva (not her real name) in the backyard of their house in a suburb of Grozny. He returned one and a half hour’s later, bruised and marked, complaining of a terrible headache. He suffered permanent damage to one of his eyes. He said that he had been beaten by the military servicemen who had demanded that his mother withdraw her complaint about the enforced disappearance of her husband. Fatima Giseeva’s husband was detained by Russian federal forces in 2000 and subsequently disappeared. Fatima Giseeva has searched for him since then, calling on law enforcement agencies to investigate, and has submitted an application to the European Court of Human Rights. Investigations of abuses Investigations were reported to have been opened into alleged torture at detention facilities run by the Operational/Search Bureau No. 2 of the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation responsible for the Southern Federal Region (ORB-2), and against individual members of the Chechen security services. Four convicted of killing six civilians (update to AI Indexes: EUR 01/005/2004, EUR 46/027/2004, EUR 01/002/2005, EUR 01/012/2005, EUR 01/007/2006 and EUR 01/001/2007) Four members of a special unit of the Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) were convicted on 14 June for killing six unarmed Chechen civilians near the village of Dai, Chechnya, in January 2002. Captain Eduard Ulman, Aleksander Kalaganskii, Vladimir Voevodin and Major Aleksei Perelevskii were convicted of murder and of “exceeding official authority” in a third hearing of the Amnesty International case by the North Caucasus district military court in Rostov-on-Don and sentenced to imprisonment in strict regime prison colonies for terms of nine to 14 years. Eduard Ulman, Vladimir Voevodin and Aleksei Perelevskii were also convicted of premeditated destruction of property. The military court, made up of three professional judges rather than a jury panel as in previous hearings, ordered that compensation be paid to the victims’ families. As in previous trials, the defendants pleaded not guilty, despite admitting the facts. While Major Aleksei Perelevskii was taken into custody in the court room, the other three men were tried in absentia, having failed to appear in court from April 2007 onwards. They were being sought by police. (See AI Index: EUR 46/025/2007.) European Court rulings on applications concerning Zura Bitieva and others (update to AI Index: EUR 01/016/2003) On 21 June the European Court of Human Rights issued a judgment concerning the arbitrary detention and subsequent extrajudicial execution, along with three other family members, of Chechen peace activist Zura Bitieva. In Bitiyeva and X v. Russia the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Russian Federation had violated the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment and the rights to liberty and security as well as to an effective remedy (Articles 2, 3, 5 and 13 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR)). Zura Bitieva, born in 1948, had filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights following her release from detention in an unofficial detention centre at Chernokozovo, Chechnya, in early 2000. She and three other members of her family were subsequently killed at home, on 21 May 2003, by unidentified armed men in camouflage. The European Court ruled that the detention of Zura Bitieva amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. The AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007