07 October 2008, 12:14
European Court received about two thousand complaints filed by residents of South Ossetia against Georgian authorities
The European Court for Human Rights (ECtHR) is literally swamped with complaints from residents of South Ossetia, which deal with the lawlessness of Georgian authorities towards them, said Jean-Paul Costa, Chairman of the ECtHR.
We remind you that on October 3 Sergey Lavrov, Minister Foreign Affairs of Russia, announced that residents of South Ossetia had filed several hundreds of claims against Georgia to the European Court for Human Rights and International Criminal Court. The "Caucasian Knot" correspondent has already informed that Ossetians had addressed the General Public Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Lois Moreno Okampo with a petition to investigate "the crimes, accomplished by citizens of Georgia in the territory of South Ossetia."
According to the Chairman of the European Court, they have already received about two thousand individual applications from people living in South Ossetia evidencing against Georgia. "The scope of work for the Court will now increase considerably," the ITAR-TASS quotes Jean-Paul Costa who spoke yesterday, on October 6, at a press conference in London.
The Reuters reports that Mr Costa has also noted that all the complaints arrived after Georgia had addressed the Strasbourg Court and the UN International Court in The Hague with complaints on Russia's actions and accusations against Russia of war crimes, including ethnic cleansings.
Today, it has become known that the UN International Court of the United Nations will announce its decision on Georgia's claim versus Russia in the course of a public sitting on October 15. The three-day hearing on this claim ended on September 10.