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Russia court denies rehabilitation of Polish officers killed in Katyn massacre

By Bernard Hibbitts (editor) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law students.

[JURIST] The Moscow City Court on Tuesday affirmed a lower court's decision not to legally rehabilitate captured Polish officers executed in 1940 during the Katyn massacre, in which more than 20,000 Polish Army reservists, academics and politicians were killed in the Katyn Forest in present-day Belarus, as well as other locations. Lawyers for the victims plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. RIA Novosti has local coverage. Russia had previously blamed the Nazis for the incident. The government of Mikhail Gorbachev admitted in 1990 that Josef Stalin had personally ordered the NKVD, the predecessor to the later Soviet KGB, to carry out the killings. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance has long sought to convince the Russian government to apply its 1991 law "On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression" to the Katyn victims, but suits have so far been unsuccessful. Russia's own 10-year investigation of the massacre ended in 2005 when the government closed its classified files and said the crime's statute of limitations had expired. In July, the Moscow City Court blocked an attempt by family members of the victims to renew investigations into the killings. In 2006, the families filed a complaint with the Court of Human Rights, asking it to classify the incident as genocide and compel the Russian government to disclose its information. In October the Court of Human rights agreed to hear a plea from family members asking that the victims of the Katyn massacre be classified as war crimes victims.

Full post as published by JURIST - The Paper Chase on November 26, 2008 (boomark / email).