Restitution Discussion Group Archives
| Sender: |
Anatol Tshchapov |
| Date: |
Sun, 28 May 2006 21:57:05 +0400 |
| Re: |
To everyone interested (from Russia-1) |
Dear Sirs!
I am interested in the restitution as a branch of law
due to several reasons. I am a student, the one who decided to devote
his time to think over land and the problems of property.
There is only one type, one meaning of restitution in
Russia - in the Civil Law! Russian tendency or a political will (common
citizens suppose that inner policy to be blur) of integrating into European
community as it is written in the Constitution of our country may be disbalanced
by only one fact. There was no restitution of property to the real owners
since 1993! Can we call Russia to be a state of law, the state of stable
political and economical situation if there are spaces and uncertainty
in Law and History?
I am looking forward for your replies. Any opinion will
be welcomed (anagen@birulevo.net).
In addition to this letter I will give you more food for thought.
Anatol Tshchapov
Human Rights Committee Dear Sirs:
This is to appeal to you, having failed to find any understanding
of our issue, namely, reinstatement of Russian proprietors’ rights
violated in a wake of unlawfulness and power abuse after 1917, in our
home country - Russia. Property of our people has been usurped by the
State through unprecedented acts of violence and revolutionary terror.
In 1991, political and economic situation in Russia changed and the government
recognized, by passing the Law “On Rehabilitation of Victims of
Political Repressions”, that “for many years since 1917, there
was terror and mass persecution of its own people perpetrated on the territory
of the Russian Federation, which practice proved incompatible with the
notion of law and justice”. Russia’s government has signed
the “Declaration on Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime
and Power Abuse” and Constitution of the Russian Federation has
guaranteed to “victims of crime and power abuse” protection
by the law, access to legal proceedings, dealing with consequences of
arbitrary rule, as well as compensation of both material and moral damage
incurred in connection therewith.
Over the course of last seven years, we have appealed
both to the President and Government of Russian Federation asking to have
our issue addressed, but what we received in response was in fact a number
of unjustified refusals or formal and useless comments from various lower-level
institutions to which our petitions were eventually routed by higher authorities
to be sorted out. Those formal negative responses appear to contradict
both common sense and Russia’s applicable law. Notwithstanding the
existing law, some government officials believe that Russia saw no “years
of terror” - rather it went through a sort of “economic experiment”,
as opposed to compulsory expropriation (see Attachment 1 containing responses
from government bodies handling our petitions: No. CM-11/1044 as of 09.06.00,
Aƣ-11/4501 as of 10.01.00 – Mingosimushchestvo, No. 22/3-15
as of 05.04.00 – the Gaidar Economics Institute, etc).
After 1991, the State has “de jure” and partly
“de facto” restored the status quo that had existed before
Russian proprietors’ civil and ownership rights were violated in
the wake of 1917. For instance, the Constitution of the Russian Federation
has restored the private ownership right and succession right, national
emblems and symbols, original city and street names. In addition, a number
of values and intellectual assets produced by our predecessors became
to be used in our everyday life. All kinds of practical things passed
on to us from the past are reasonably used now despite repressions and
the havoc wrought to our country in the period between 1917 and 1990.
In his address to the nation, the President of Russian Federation justified
the need for reforms that are under way now, including the recently passed
Succession Right Law, saying that “we shall live the way they did
before 1917”. Russian government has accepted Russia’s debts
to Great Britain and France and is assisting in distributing compensation
funds provided by Germany to those victimized by the Nazi terror. It is
only to a portion of its own people that Russian government has denied
so far the acknowledgment and restitution of their violated property rights.
Without any legal grounds, the Russian State keeps holding the ownership
of and managing property usurped from its own people. Over the last 5
or 6 years, such usurped property has been sold out to individuals for
private use in order to void our issue and claims through the newly created
problem – that of allegedly “bona fide purchasers” of
our usurped property.
We therefore would like to appeal to you, in accordance
with the “Universal Human Rights Declaration” and “Declaration
on the Basic Justice Principles for Victims of Crime and Power Abuse”,
and also would kindly ask you to essentially consider our claims based
on applicable international law. To this end, we would like to submit
to you an overview of violations as presented in the enclosed list of
particular claims and cases on our behalf. We hope that by appealing to
you we would prompt both the President of the Russian Federation as guarantor
of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the Government of the
Russian Federation to closely address this issue of ours, including by
hearing from all the parties concerned, and finally resolve the problem
of restituting the rights of victims of crime and power abuse.
United Nations Organization
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