The European court of human rights has awarded compensation of 20 thousand euros to the resident of Ulyanovsk Valeria Volodina who left Russia. She had to leave because for a long time the police refused to initiate criminal proceedings due to threats and beatings of her ex-boyfriend. This is the first decision of the ECHR on domestic violence in Russia. The court's decision was published on its website on July 9.
The ECHR came to the conclusion that the Russian authorities had violated two articles of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: Article 3 (Prohibition of torture: «No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment») and article 14 (Prohibition of discrimination). Compensation for the victim should be paid by the government of Russia.
In 2016, Valeria Volodina left Russia after police officers repeatedly refused to initiate criminal proceedings against her former boyfriend, Azerbaijani citizen Rashid Salayev. According to Volodina (Mediazona), he regularly threatened her with murder in messengers, stalked her, using a GPS-tracker, kidnapped her after she moved to Moscow, posted her intimate photos that her minor son and his school friends could see, damaged the brake system of her car. Volodina had a miscarriage because she had been beaten by Salayev. A police officer advised her to "hide better".
As a result, the Investigative Committee opened a case against Salayev because of the violation of privacy, but the court refused to choose a preventive measure for him that would allow Volodina to feel safe, so she left the country.
According to the head of human rights group "Agora" Pavel Chikov, this is the first decision of the ECHR on domestic violence in Russia.
In April 2019, the Leninsky District Court of Orenburg decided to collect 50 thousand rubles from the Investigative Committee of Russia in favor of Vladimir Prytkov because of the ineffective investigation of his reports on tortures in the police. Prytkov demanded compensation of 400 thousand rubles.