process

Yesterday, the criminal case of Colonel Yuri Budanov, accused of murdering the Chechen girl Elza Kungaeva, was submitted for a new trial to the North Caucasus District Military Court. As Kommersant has learned, it is now undergoing registration, after which a new court will begin considering the case, which has been pending since February 2001.
The previous decision of Rostov judge Viktor Kostin, who declared Colonel Budanov insane at the time of the murder, was protested by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Kungaev family. In particular, the Kungaevs’ lawyers insisted that they did not have the opportunity to appeal the list of experts appointed by the court to conduct an additional psychological and psychiatric examination, and the GVP’s cassation submission challenged the conclusions of the examination itself. Having examined all the documents, the military collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia considered that the decision in the Budanov case was made in violation of the norms of procedural law and the case was subject to re-examination by another panel of the North Caucasian Military District court.
According to Abdulla Khamzaev, the lawyer of Elza Kungaeva’s father, the decision of the Supreme Court fully satisfied the injured party. He told Kommersant that Rostov judge Viktor Kostin was biased towards the injured party from the very beginning, so “the outcome of the case was predetermined, and the process itself was more like a circus performance: repeated requests from the lawyer to disqualify the judge from all participants in the process, including the previous state prosecutor Sergei Nazarov, preferred to ignore, claims and petitions were not noticed along the way.” So the December recognition of the defendant as insane did not surprise the victims at all, and all their hopes, according to Mr. Khamzaev, were connected “with the consideration of Mr. Kostin’s initiative” in the Supreme Court.
Abdulla Khamzaev does not exclude the possibility that during the new consideration of the case, Yuri Budanov may be assigned another (fourth) psychological and psychiatric examination. In a conversation with a Kommersant correspondent, the lawyer noted that the experts who examined the defendant at the Serbsky Center based their conclusions “on the emotions and fabrications of Budanov himself, and not on medical indications.” However, Mr. Khamzaev did not talk about whether the injured party would insist on conducting a new examination, proposing to wait for the start of the process.
As for the accused, his defenders doubt “the adequacy of the decisions taken by various judicial authorities.” As Yuri Budanov’s lawyer Anatoly Mukhin told a Kommersant correspondent, “no matter how much the injured party talks about legality, Mr. Khamzaev’s actions make it very clear that his only goal so far has been to prolong the process and try to achieve the solution they need, which is unacceptable from the point of view of legal norms.” methods." And the decision of the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, according to Mr. Mukhin, contradicts all the norms of legal proceedings in the Russian Federation, violating them in terms of “a uniform approach to the law by all judicial bodies.”
Numerous public defenders of Yuri Budanov, including officers of the armed forces, say approximately the same thing. According to their estimates, after the latest decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, Budanov’s case “has finally crossed all reasonable boundaries of politicization” and the further course of the trial will depend largely not on the efforts of lawyers and prosecutors, but on the policy pursued by the federal center in Chechnya. Many of them connect the cancellation of the court decision with the referendum on the Chechen constitution.
Yesterday it became known that Colonel of Justice Vladimir Bukreev, deputy chairman of the North Caucasus Military District court, will preside over the upcoming trial. According to the assistant to the chairman of the court, Vladimir Golovanov, the judge is already studying the case materials and will soon set a date for new hearings.
SERGEY Kommersant-Konovalov, Rostov-on-Don

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 43 dated March 14, 2003, p. 8

Themes:

Case of Yuri Budanov

Yuri Budanov returned to court