Reports
MOLDOVA SHALL REPAY €45K COMPENSATION TO VICTIM OF POLICE TORTURING – ECHR
Chisinau. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the Government of Moldova shall repay €45 thousand to Sergei Gurgurov for the brutal treatment he underwent while in custody in Chisinau.
His lawyer Veaceslav Turcan told a news conference in Infotag today Sergei was caught by police in 2005 on suspicion of stealing mobile telephones.
In Turcan’s words, the young man then refused to confess in what he had never done. That infuriated the police, who started beating him up, and eventually began using electricity and putting very heavy items things on him, demanding to sign confession protocols. As a result, Sergei Gurgurov became a Group I invalid, and his labor capacity has been brought down to 75%.
The lawyer highlighted a very essential circumstance: this ruling of the ECHR’s marks a precedent for Moldova.
He explained, the ECHR judgment reads that the Moldovan Prosecutor General's Office tried to conceal the offences committed by the cops, who resorted to tortures instead of carrying out an investigation to establish the truth.
“Now the Gurgurov case will be continued already in Moldova, for we shall demand to bring to criminal responsibility the prosecutors, who did not wish to reveal and punish the butchers who had tortured Sergei. Needless to say that if the Moldovan judiciary is on the torturers’ side again, we shall again appeal to the European Court”, stated Turcan.
He stressed, “Those lawyers and judges who take bribes and convey them up to high corrupt officials must be isolated from the civil society, otherwise the Republic of Moldova will keep on repaying millions from the State Budget in compensation to torture victims and other citizens only because corrupt jurists deny them of a fair trial in their home country”.
Amnesty International Moldova Executive Director Yevgeny Goloshapov said at the news conference that yet in 2005 the AIM, together with other human right organizations, began demanding to bring the uniformed slaughterers to criminal responsibility.
“The Prosecutor Office claims Gurgurov only pretends to be an invalid. However, independent forensic experts and other medical specialists confirmed that before getting into the policemen’s paws the young man had been healthy. In custody, he used to be was tortured till unconsciousness”, said the AIM Executive Director.
