Background and context

The Chechnya Justice Project is a groundbreaking initiative that utilizes domestic and international legal mechanisms to seek redress for ongoing human rights violations in Chechnya. Together, its implementing partners—the Moscow office of the Stichting Russia Justice Initiative (Netherlands) and the Ingushetia-based organization Pravovaia Initsiativa—provide free legal counsel to select victims of human rights violations and their families. Chechnya Justice Project lawyers and researchers investigate incidents of arbitrary detention, torture, forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions and bring these cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

From its earliest days, the second armed conflict in Chechnya (1999-present) has been marked by large-scale grave abuses of human rights, including torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution, committed by both sides of the conflict. Notably, the persistent lack of will on the part of the Russian government to guarantee the rule of law and act on abuses perpetrated by its forces in Chechnya has served to perpetuate this violence.

The Chechnya Justice Project emerged out of small litigation activities begun in 2000 as a response to this problem of impunity for abuses in Chechnya. Initially, members and volunteers of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch put victims in contact with experienced European lawyers, who, in turn, prepared applications to the European Court on the victims’ behalf.  By mid-2001, as a growing number of victims expressed a desire to bring proceedings to Strasbourg, these ad-hoc efforts were no longer sufficient.

Thus, in late 2001, a group of human rights activists founded the Stichting Chechnya Justice Initiative in the Netherlands, with an office in Moscow, and a local organization in Ingushetia now known as Pravovaia Initsiativa to implement jointly the Chechnya Justice Project. Since that time, the project retained that structure and steadily increased the number of victims it represents. In December 2004, the organization’s governing board took a decision to officially rename the Stichting Chechnya Justice Initiative, the Stichting Russian Justice Initiative.

In just a few years’ time, Chechnya Justice Project has established itself as one of the leading legal representation and litigation projects in Russia today.  As grave human rights abuses continue, and the climate of impunity persists, the work of the Chechnya Justice Project remains wholly relevant and crucial in its contribution toward ending violence and opening the way for a lasting peace and the development of genuine democracy in the Northern Caucasus.

Executive summary >>