The ECHR recognized homosexual Maxim Lapunov as a victim of torture in Chechnya

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled in the case of Russian Maxim Lapunov, who was the first to publicly state that he was tortured in Chechnya. Strasbourg admitted that Mr. Lapunov was subjected to targeted violence “solely because of his sexual orientation.” According to the ECtHR, the Russian authorities did not conduct a proper investigation and did not take “any reasonable steps to examine the role that homophobic motives may have played in the ill-treatment of the applicant.”

In 2019, human rights activists reported a targeted campaign against members of the LGBT community in Chechnya. The first to report torture was Maxim Lapunov. He came to the republic in 2015 to work, and in March 2017 he was detained by unknown persons in the center of Grozny. “He was detained by people in plain clothes and taken to the basement of one of the police departments, the so-called gay prison. Trying to get information about familiar LGBT people in the republic, security forces beat Maxim with pieces of polypropylene pipes, tortured him with electric shock, and threatened to kill him,” claimed the “Team Against Torture” (recognized as a foreign agent), whose employees were involved in the case of Maxim Lapunov.

In April of the same year, Novaya Gazeta announced mass persecution of gays in Chechnya. From the investigation she published, it followed that more than a hundred men suspected of homosexuality were detained in Chechnya; they were tortured and some were killed. Later, the Prosecutor General’s Office reported that the regional prosecutor’s office was verifying this information. On April 19, 2017, Ramzan Kadyrov, at a meeting with Vladimir Putin, stated that reports of torture in the republic were not true. However, in May of the same year, Ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova asked Vladimir Putin to create an interdepartmental working group to verify this information.

In September 2017, at the request of Maxim Lapunov, a pre-investigation check was organized. As a result, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (ICR) refused to initiate a criminal case. After this, Maxim Lapunov decided to leave the Russian Federation. Ms. Moskalkova repeatedly tried to appeal the refusal to initiate a criminal case, but was unsuccessful: the Investigative Committee referred to Mr. Lapunov’s refusal to appear to testify. For its part, the victim’s defense stated that before leaving, Mr. Lapunov offered the Investigative Committee to identify everyone who participated in the torture, but the investigation refused to provide him with state protection. In May 2019, human rights activists appealed to the ECHR. Four years later, the court found that in the spring of 2017, Mr. Lapunov was illegally deprived of his liberty and tortured for 12 days because of his sexual orientation, and Russia refused to conduct an objective investigation. The ECHR awarded Maxim Lapunov compensation for moral damage in the amount of €52 thousand. Let us recall that on March 15, 2022, Russia announced its withdrawal from the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as its refusal to implement ECHR decisions.

Emilia Gabdullina