TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
AP2 (Applicant): Ma ona zastosowanie także w obecnym prawodawstwie ukształtowanym na fundamentalnych wartościach współczesnej demokracji.
AP2 (Applicant): Moi mocodawcy, panowie Jerzy Janowiec i Antoni Trybowski zobowiązali mnie do przedstawienia na dzisiejszym wysłuchaniu kwestii rehabilitacji ich przodków.
AP2 (Applicant): Odnosi się to zresztą do wszystkich ofiar zbrodni.
AP2 (Applicant): Otóż w tej kwestii mamy do czynienia z wyraźną hipokryzją strony rosyjskiej.
AP2 (Applicant): Jej stanowisko sprowadza się do tego, że gdyby polscy oficerowie, jeńcy wojenni zostali rozstrzelani po uprzednim ich osądzeniu i skazaniu na karę śmierci, to byłaby obecnie podstawa prawna do ich rehabilitacji.
AP2 (Applicant): Skoro zaś zostali zamordowani bez wyroku sądowego, bez zapewnienia im elementarnych praw do obrony, to już nie można ich rehabilitować, bowiem nie mieści się to w rosyjskim systemie prawnym.
AP2 (Applicant): Jest to oczywista nieprawda.
AP2 (Applicant): W powołanym wyżej orzeczeniu ekspertów profesora Topornina z 1992 roku na stronie 59. jest jednoznaczne stwierdzenie, cytuję
AP2 (Applicant): Polscy jeńcy wojenni podlegają rehabilitacji jako niewinne ofiary represji stalinowskich zgodnie z artykułem 2 i 3 ustawy Federacji Rosyjskiej o rehabilitacji ofiar represji politycznych.
AP2 (Applicant): W tej kwestii wypowiedział się także już wysoki trybunał w punkcie 160 wyroku V Izby z 16 kwietnia ubiegłego roku, odrzucając argument rządu rosyjskiego, w cudzysłowie, że należy pominąć postępowanie rehabilitacyjne.
AP2 (Applicant): Pozostaje jedynie problem wyegzekwowania od Federacji Rosyjskiej rehabilitacji wszystkich ofiar zbrodni, co jest w ramach obecnie obowiązującego rosyjskiego prawodawstwa możliwe, a moralnie absolutnie konieczne.
AP2 (Applicant): Konkludując, podtrzymuję przedstawione wcześniej Wysokiemu Trybunałowi swoje pisemne wnioski oraz popieram prośby Panów Janowca i Trybowskiego wniesione przez nich bezpośrednio do Trybunału o zasądzenie od strony rosyjskiej na ich rzecz stosownego zadośćuczynienia.
AP2 (Applicant): Korzystając z okazji, pragnę wyrazić głęboką wdzięczność rządowi RP oraz Rosyjskiemu Stowarzyszeniu Memoriał, a także wszystkim organizacjom pozarządowym, które wspierają nasze działania w tłuczącym się postępowaniu.
AP2 (Applicant): Dziękuję za uwagę.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): Thank you, Mr. Szewczyk.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): I call Mr. Kamiński.
AP3 (Applicant): Mr. President, members of the distinguished court,
AP3 (Applicant): today the court asked us several complex questions.
AP3 (Applicant): During the short time allotted to us, we are able only to summarize our answers, concentrating on the focal points.
AP3 (Applicant): Longer answers with numerous references to international law and case law constitute an elaborate written memorandum of more than 60 pages we've just deposited in the court's registry.
AP3 (Applicant): Article two, admissibility of the complaint.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian government questions the court's competence rationae temporis to deal with the procedural obligation under article two.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian government is relying only on several pre-Silich inadmissibility decisions and is ignoring altogether the coherent post-Silich law.
AP3 (Applicant): Today, the court has unanimously applied its position adopted in Silich in 21 subsequent judgments.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian government wants to turn the Strasbourg clock back to the pre-Silich period.
AP3 (Applicant): The Katy massacre is an imprescriptible crime of international law.
AP3 (Applicant): When committed in 1940, it constituted a violation of universally binding customary rules of international law that prohibited killings of prisoners of war.
AP3 (Applicant): That such a universal prohibition existed is evidenced by post-war trials.
AP3 (Applicant): The Katy massacre may be qualified also as a genocide when seen in a broader perspective of four waves of deportations after the Soviet aggression in 1939 and the so-called Polish operation in 1937, 1938, in which more than 100,000 citizens of Polish nationality were executed in the Soviet Union because of their national origin.
AP3 (Applicant): The Katyn massacre was called, I quote, a war crime having the features of genocide, for example, in a statement of the delegation of the European Union-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee.
AP3 (Applicant): As a mass scale and imprescriptible crime of international law, the Katyn massacre is contrary to the underlying values of the convention.
AP3 (Applicant): The chamber agreed on that.
AP3 (Applicant): Therefore, the last sentence of paragraph 163 of the Schillig judgment applies.
AP3 (Applicant): But the chamber's majority decided that additionally, there must be new sufficiently important material surfacing in the post-ratification period.
AP3 (Applicant): We agree with the three dissenting judges that such a requirement limits the rational referring to the underlying values of the convention.
AP3 (Applicant): There exist violations of international law of such magnitude at scale, for example, the Holocaust and the Katyn massacre, for which the court should be competent under Article 2 in its procedural limb, of course, without referring to the new material test.
AP3 (Applicant): In this context, we draw the attention of the court to the constructs of aggravated state responsibility and state crimes as applied in the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
AP3 (Applicant): We share the view of the three dissenting judges that the death of almost 22,000 people committed by the state's order cries out for such consideration.
AP3 (Applicant): The Inter-American Court granted its razione temporis jurisdiction on the fact that the state had been involved in a given massacre.
AP3 (Applicant): To translate it into the language of the European court, a genuine connection resided in the very character of the crime as a crime of international law.
AP3 (Applicant): No other elements were needed for the Inter-American Court to become temporarily competent.
AP3 (Applicant): But we consider that this court will be competent to hear this case even when the new element test is accepted.
AP3 (Applicant): This test should not be limited to the new important evidence surfacing in the post-artification period, but should be understood more broadly as a new procedural fact.
AP3 (Applicant): If there is a sudden radical shift in the proceedings leading up to the adoption of conclusions that starkly contradict the findings in the previous stages of the investigation and even the historically established facts, this constitute a new element relevant for the court.
AP3 (Applicant): Such cases can be called perversion cases and the cutting investigation in Russia is one of them.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian authorities turned dead people lying in several burial sites into disappeared people whose fate is allegedly unknown.
AP3 (Applicant): But also we allege that even the restrictive reading of the new element test as new evidence would lead the court to having jurisdiction in this case.
AP3 (Applicant): As recently as on the 2nd August, 2004, the Russian prosecution made a ruling to include into the cutting case files voluminous materials received from Ukraine on this part of the cutting massacre which had been perpetrated in Ukraine.
AP3 (Applicant): It was expressly stated in this ruling that the Ukrainian materials related to the execution of the Polish citizen in 1940.
AP3 (Applicant): In its recent letter to the court dated 17th of January this year, the Russian government attempts to dismiss these materials and containing a manifestly unsubstantiated conclusions about the fact those documents concern the execution of 3,435 Polish citizens in the spring of 1940.
AP3 (Applicant): It is puzzling which national authority and on which legal grounds excludes or disqualifies the material in question from the file when the case is already closed.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian government submitted there is a difference in legal terms between situation in which a material act, killings, death occurred before and after the date on which the European convention came into legal force.
AP3 (Applicant): We do not agree for the following reasons.
AP3 (Applicant): First, the obligation to investigate is of an autonomous and continuing character.
AP3 (Applicant): It is not a novelty created by the convention.
AP3 (Applicant): The procedural obligation is implicit in the prohibition of killing of prisoners of war.
AP3 (Applicant): If under international law, violations of such prohibition were deemed to lead already before the war to both state and individual responsibility, investigative obligations must be presumed as mandatory for the establishment of the relevant facts.
AP3 (Applicant): Second, we broadly refer to the case law of several international institutions.
AP3 (Applicant): The Inter-American Court on Human Rights found itself competent to adjudicate on the obligation to investigate when the killings occurred before the Inter-American Convention entered it into legal force.
AP3 (Applicant): First of all, the Gomez-Lund case.
AP3 (Applicant): Highly relevant for this case is also the decision of the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Norma Urich versus Chile.
AP3 (Applicant): This case concerned a killing that preceded the date on which the Convention on Political Rights entered into legal force.
AP3 (Applicant): The committee found the communication inadmissible over a short time period, having regard to a declaration of the Chilean government made upon the ratification of the covenant.
AP3 (Applicant): The declaration stipulated that the committee would be competent to consider communications in respect to acts, I quote, which began after the 11th of March, 1990.
AP3 (Applicant): There are good reasons to hold that states are precluded from making these kinds of declarations in respect of human rights, international law treaties.
AP3 (Applicant): But as this room is not a lecture hall, I only say that taken at face value, this declaration of, and the committee's accepting reaction to it demonstrates that there exists a legal instrument for states wishing to limit in temporal terms the application of a given treaty.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian Federation has not made such a declaration or reservation when ratifying the European Convention.
AP3 (Applicant): Third, we wish to stress that unless otherwise stated in the treaty, its provisions apply to situations that do not cease to exist after the treaty's entry into legal force.
AP3 (Applicant): That a state party wishing to exclude the application of the treaty to such situations must do so by means of an expressed reservation.
AP3 (Applicant): This position is mirrored in the case law of the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Court of Justice, Mavromatis Palestine's concession, Fosfax in Morocco, for example.
AP3 (Applicant): In this context, we respectfully draw the attention of the court to the distinction made between the situations or facts of the treaty and the facts which constitute a source of the rights claimed by a party to the proceedings and a source of the dispute.
AP3 (Applicant): The Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Court of Justice confirmed that whereas the source of the dispute must relate to the situations or facts subsequent to the ratification, the rights of a party to the dispute may originate in the pre-ratification period.
AP3 (Applicant): Our government holds, moreover, that this court is not competent, ratione materie, to assess the Ketting massacre as it is a matter of international humanitarian law lying beyond the reach of the convention.
AP3 (Applicant): Again, we object.
AP3 (Applicant): First, a number of international courts confirmed that international humanitarian law and international human rights law are not separated but constitute complementary sets of rules.
AP3 (Applicant): A ratione materie rejection of the kind submitted in this case by the Russian government was also raised by Salvador in the case of Serrano Cruz's sister.
AP3 (Applicant): The Inter-American Court rejected it.
AP3 (Applicant): When humanitarian law is applicable, rules of this law are used to establish the scope and content of the rights and freedoms protected under human rights treaties.
AP3 (Applicant): So we conclude that the court is competent to hear this case.
AP3 (Applicant): And going to the merits of the complaint, we wish only to state that for the following reasons, the Ketting investigation in Russia cannot be considered effective.
AP3 (Applicant): First, the applicant's right to participate effectively in the investigation was not secured.
AP3 (Applicant): The applicants were denied victim status and access to the case file.
AP3 (Applicant): The classification of the most important parts of the case file appears arbitrary.
AP3 (Applicant): The application faced a prolonged denial of information about the fate of their relatives.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian authorities adopted the version of the disappearance of the applicant's relatives as the official one.
AP3 (Applicant): The Russian courts rejected all applications for rehabilitation, claiming that it was not possible to determine the specific legal provision forming the basis for the execution of the Polish prisoners of war.
AP3 (Applicant): We do not find it reasonable to entertain, and going to the decision on the classification of the Russian case file on the Ketting massacre, we wish to state that this decision does not apply to one single document, but to as many as 35 volumes of the case file.
AP3 (Applicant): We do not find it reasonable to entertain the security reasons interest that might have justified the decision of the Russian Federation to classify.
AP3 (Applicant): Instead, we wish, again, to refer to international law standards.
AP3 (Applicant): There are many international law documents and case law emphasizing the need for revealing truth, a right to truth, as it is stated, in cases of gross human rights violations.
AP3 (Applicant): This right to truth is both of individual and societal character.
AP3 (Applicant): Relatives must know what happened to their loved ones and where their bodies are buried.
AP3 (Applicant): And societists must discover what atrocities occurred under the authoritarian rules in cases of power abuse.
AP3 (Applicant): We respectfully submit that this case offers the court a special opportunity to declare that under Article 2 of the Convention, read in conjunction with Article 1, there exists the right to truth when human rights have been grossly violated by state's agents.
AP3 (Applicant): Thank you for your attention.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): Thank you, Mr. Kamiński.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): I call Mr. Sochański.
AP1 (Applicant): Mr. President, distinguished judges, if my watch is correct,
AP1 (Applicant): I'm a little bit behind the schedule, so I have five minutes left.
AP1 (Applicant): I shall concentrate on questions number three, four, and five of the court.
AP1 (Applicant): And of course, shall uphold the standpoint produced for the court in our written observations in this respect.
AP1 (Applicant): I quoted the jurisprudence and appropriate judgments.
AP1 (Applicant): Now, question number three.
AP1 (Applicant): There is an established case law of this court under Article Three concerning the state obligations towards relatives of persons who are victims of enforced disappearances or killings.
AP1 (Applicant): These obligations include obligation to investigate and to prosecute, if appropriate, obligation to give equal and effective access to justice, the obligation to redress damage, as well as the obligation to adopt a humanitarian approach, of course, obligation to provide information.
AP1 (Applicant): As far as the quest for information is concerned, the victims' families have the right to know the fate of their missing relatives, including their whereabouts, or if dead, the circumstances and cause of their death, as well as the location of their burial site and access to their mortal remains.
AP1 (Applicant): My colleague has already presented this subject.
AP1 (Applicant): Indeed, this duty originates from the right to truth, which has both individual and collective components.
AP1 (Applicant): Honorable judges, we have to agree with the chamber judgment referring to obligation of a state to adopt a humanitarian approach.
AP1 (Applicant): It enjoys this humanitarian approach principle, requires the authorities to react to the plight in a human and sympathetic and compassionate way, even in cases of procedural obstacles hindering the investigation.
AP1 (Applicant): Shortly to question four, here we cannot agree with the chamber's decision to divide the applicants into two groups according only to proximity of family ties and the dates of birth.
AP1 (Applicant): The Chechen cases, considering minor applicants the chamber relied on, are irrelevant in the cases issue.
AP1 (Applicant): In fact, children's emotions depend on their relations to parents, but as far as adults are concerned, their emotions do not depend so much on remembrances of their relatives, but rather on authorities' reactions.
AP1 (Applicant): It becomes then irrelevant if they do or do not remember their fathers.
AP1 (Applicant): Victim recognition assessment should depend on all circumstances of the case.
AP1 (Applicant): And as far as Article Three is concerned, it should strongly depend on the involvement of family member in the attempts to obtain information about the disappeared person and the manner in which the authorities responded to this inquires.
AP1 (Applicant): In our case, the essence of alleged violation of the Russian Federation does not lie so much directly in the fact of disappearance or assassination of victims, Polish prisoners of war, but rather it concerns about the authorities' reactions and attitudes toward the applicants when searching for justice.
AP1 (Applicant): At this point, I would like to refer to our written observation and show some books written and edited by those applicants who are not assessed by the chamber as victims.
AP1 (Applicant): Honorable judges, it is clear and obvious that the Russian Federation manifested violent Article Three of the Convention by subjecting all applicants to degrading treatment.
AP1 (Applicant): We entirely agree with the chamber judgment in this respect.
AP1 (Applicant): In points, in 10 points, 157 to 166, the court explains in detail the actions and omissions of Russian authorities that must be assessed as degrading treatment.
AP1 (Applicant): The exclusion from the rights to study the materials, cart and uninformative replies, self-contradictory and ambiguous findings contrary to historical facts, lack of official information, consistent rejection of rehabilitation requests under pretext of disappeared files, and the suggestion that the Polish prisoners might have faced criminal charges.
AP1 (Applicant): In fact, the Russian authorities' denial of the killings of the Polish officers is contrary to underlying values of the Convention.
AP1 (Applicant): Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): Thank you, Mr. Sochański.
Josep Casadevall (JudgeP): I give the floor to Mr. Matyushkin.
GR1 (Government): Honorable judges, I would like to start my submission by stressing that the Russian authorities have been repeatedly expressing their condemnation of the atrocities of the totalitarian regime, to which not only the Polish nationals, but also hundreds of thousands of Soviet people have fallen victims.
GR1 (Government): Turning to the present case, the Russian authorities believe that while considering this case, it is necessary, first of all, to decide which particular basic rules of international law concerning the responsibility of states can be applied.
GR1 (Government): In this connection, some relevant guidance can be found in the report of the International Law Commission to the General Assembly on draft articles on the responsibility of states for internationally wrongful acts.
GR1 (Government): The statement in their report, assuming that a question has arisen as to whether the state has complied with its obligation, a number of other issues of a general character arise, namely, determining in what circumstances conduct is to be attributed to the state as a subject of international law, specifying when and for what period of time there is or has been a breach of an international obligation by the state, determining any procedural or substantive preconditions to invoke the responsibility of the state in the circumstances in which the right to invoke responsibility may be lost.
GR1 (Government): The basic principle of international law is that each state is responsible for its own conduct in respect of its own international obligations.
GR1 (Government): For this to happen, it is necessary that the conditions required to establish the existence of an internationally wrongful act of the state are met.
GR1 (Government): Two elements are identified.
GR1 (Government): First, the conduct in question must be attributable to the state under international law.
GR1 (Government): Secondly, the conduct must constitute a breach of an international legal obligation in force for the state at that time.
GR1 (Government): These two elements were specified, for example, by Permanent Court of International Justice in their Fasfazi in Morocco case.
GR1 (Government): International Court of Justice has also referred to the two elements on several occasions.
GR1 (Government): Similarly, in the Dixon Carville Company case, the Mexico United States General Claims Commission noted that the condition required for a state to incur international responsibility is that an unlawful international act be imputed to it, that is, that there exists a violation of a duty imposed by an international judicial standard.
GR1 (Government): At that, as a normative operation, attribution of an act must be clearly distinguished from the characterization of conduct as internationally wrongful.
GR1 (Government): None of the conditions above are met in the present case.
GR1 (Government): For a responsibility to exist, the breach must accue at a time when the state is bound by the obligation.
GR1 (Government): As stated by Judge Huber, Permanent Court of Arbitration, in the Island of Palmas case, a judicial fact must be appreciated in the light of the law contemporary with it, and not of the law in force at the time when a dispute in regard to it arises or falls to be settled.
GR1 (Government): The same principle has been applied by the European Commission and this court, for example, in the X versus Germany case.
GR1 (Government): There seems to be no reason for departing from the well-established case law in the present case.
GR1 (Government): As to the procedural obligation under Article 2, it is not simply beyond the court's jurisdiction, but it has not been triggered at all since it can arise only as a suppliment to the respondent state's obligation to protect someone's right to life.
GR1 (Government): In 1940, the applicant's relatives were not within the jurisdiction of Russia for the purposes of Article 1 of the Convention.
GR1 (Government): In 1990, the Russian authorities were under no obligation to pursue the investigation into the cut-in events in accordance with either international or domestic law.
GR1 (Government): The fact that they choose for whatever reasons to conduct an investigation does not have the effect of imposing Article 2 standards on their corresponding proceedings.
GR1 (Government): The procedural obligation binds the respondent states throughout the period in which the authorities can reasonably be expected to take measures with an aim to elucidate their circumstances of death and establish responsibility for it.
GR1 (Government): In the present case, it was, however, impossible to reach those goals due to a number of objective insurmountable obstacles.