Russia condemned over Kremlin critic Nemtsov's murder probe

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday ruled that the Russian investigation into the fatal shooting of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov had been "ineffective."

The Strasbourg-based judges found that Russian authorities had failed to adequately investigate who had organized and commissioned the assassination. They also said officials had not done enough to explore accusations of a possible political motive.

What happened in the Nemtsov case?

Nemtsov, who briefly served as deputy prime minister of Russia under former President Boris Yeltsin, had become an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He was shot in 2015 while crossing a bridge close to the Kremlin. At the time of his assassination, Nemtsov was in Moscow helping to organize a rally against Russia's military intervention in Ukraine. In the weeks before his death, he expressed fears that Putin would have him killed.

In 2017, a Moscow court convicted five Chechen men in the death, sentencing them to jail terms of between 11 and 20 years. They were allegedly paid for the murder but never revealed who hired them or their possible reason.

The ECHR observed that the presiding judge in Moscow had "disallowed some questions to witnesses pertaining to possible political undertones of the murder."

Among the leads that the court ignored were possible links between the killers and Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, an ally of Putin's of whom Nemtsov had also been critical. The ECHR noted that the Russian court had "refused requests for certain witnesses including federal and Chechen Republic officials to be questioned."

What the ECHR decided

"The five convictions notwithstanding, the Russian authorities had an obligation to investigate who had commissioned and organized the murder," the ECHR concluded. 

"The allegations that Mr. Nemtsov's murder could have been politically motivated and that certain state officials could have been involved in the events were not implausible," it said.

"The investigation had singularly failed to either explore the political motive for the assassination with particular diligence or to come up with another plausible explanation for the motives behind the murder," the judges added. 

The case against Russia was brought by Nemtsov's daughter, Zhanna Borisovna Nemtsova. The court ruled that Russia should pay Nemtsova €20,000 ($22,000) in non-pecuniary damages for having broken the European Convention on Human Rights.

Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe after invading Ukraine and ceased to be a party to the Convention on September 16, 2022. However, the ECHR insists that it is bound to comply with rulings on actions or violations up until that date.

Several thousand lawsuits are still pending against Russia relating to the time before the deadline.

AFP material contributed to this report

Edited by: Louis Oelofse