Lawyer for Ingush Activist Sautiyeva Prepared to Take Her Case to European Court if Necessary

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 15 – Bilan Dzugayev, lawyer for detained Ingush activist Zarifa Sautiyeva, says that he will take her case all the way to the European Court for Human Rights if Russian courts do not recognize the baselessness of the charges against her and free her from incarceration.

            In an interview with Elbert Sagov of the Sixth Portal site, Dzugayev says that her case and that of other Ingush prisoners are of a piece with the Moscow and Rostov cases, the only significant difference being that Ingush officials pioneered the use of charges that demonstrators had attacked police (6portal.ru/posts/ингушское-болотное-дело-из-одной/).

            Meanwhile, in a much-commented upon event, Musa Zurabov, the head of the Union of Teips of the Ingush People, reported about his recent visit to Grozny to meet with Magomed Daudov, the head of the Chechen parliament, and show him documents proving that the land Yunus-Bek Yevkurov gave Chechnya is Ingush territory (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/341202/ and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/341243/).

            He said he had expected Ingush officials to do so after Daudov claimed otherwise and the historical documents, all of them official, had become available. But they didn’t, and so he decided he had no choice but to take them to Grozny himself.  He said that he had been received politely but that Daudov had shown no willingness to be moved.

            What makes this action significant is that a private person has acted as the republic government should have but failed to do, a move that may open the door to more such moves by ordinary Ingush and thus further reduce the authority of the Magas government.