The ECHR awarded 52 thousand euros to photographer Maxim Lapunov, who was kidnapped in Grozny in March 2017 because of his homosexuality and held for 12 days in the basement of the criminal investigation department in Chechnya.
“This is what they do to fags here.” What a Perm resident who visited a Chechen prison for gays said: the main thing
Novaya Gazeta reported on the mass persecution of gays in Chechnya in April 2017. Six months later, Lapunov, who was born in the Omsk region and lived in the Perm region before moving to Grozny, became the first to openly confirm the existence of “secret prisons” for gays in the republic.
Lapunov said that he was kidnapped by several men in the evening in the center of Grozny, when he was selling balloons. They brought him to the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, read the correspondence in instant messengers and demanded to name the names of gay people he knew. The security forces said that “they are only interested in Chechens.” Over the course of 12 days, Chechen operatives beat Lapunov several times in his cell with plastic pipes, and then took him to the bus station, bought him a ticket to another region and demanded that he remain silent about the kidnapping.
The Permian himself explained his release by saying that a criminal case had been opened in the Perm region because of his disappearance.
In September 2017, Lapunov turned to the Investigative Committee, which began an investigation into his application. Later, the investigator refused to open a case about the kidnapping and torture of Lapunov, and the courts recognized this decision as legal. In November 2018, the young man said that he left Russia due to threats. Despite his requests, he was not provided with state protection.
Lapunov was assisted by human rights activists from the crisis group SK SOS and Team Against Torture. The ECtHR found that in Lapunov’s case the right to freedom from unlawful deprivation of liberty (Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights) and the right to freedom from torture because of sexual orientation (Article 3 in conjunction with Article 14 of the European Convention) were violated.
At the same time, Russia, after being excluded from the Council of Europe, within which the ECHR operates, refused to implement court decisions made after March 15, 2022.