Human rights activists appealed to the ECHR with a request to protect mothers in the North Caucasus

The project "Legal Initiative" appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with a complaint about the government's position regarding the case of Elita Magomadova, who has not seen her son for more than two years.

As human rights activists told Novaya Gazeta, the ECtHR began considering the complaint. In the response of the ECtHR in the case of Elita Magomadova, the government referred to the “national peculiarities of raising children in Chechen families”, according to which, when a family breaks up, a child is brought up in the father’s family.

“The government, in its response to questions from the European Court, directly recognized discrimination against mothers in the North Caucasus, which, according to our data, is a systemic problem,” says Olga Gnezdilova, a lawyer for the Legal Initiative.

According to her, the defenders are engaged in several similar cases. “Our organization is also pursuing in court the case of a woman whom the relatives of her deceased husband were able to deprive of parental rights in relation to her six children. And the other day we sent a complaint to the court of a Muscovite of Ingush origin, from whom two children were taken away, one of whom was still nursing, in order to raise her ex-husband's elderly parents in a family. The refusal of the state to guarantee the rights of all family members is a violation of Article 8 of the Convention and discrimination against women,” adds the lawyer.

In 2013, the father took the three-year-old boy to Grozny without telling Magomadova about it. The local court ruled that the child must live with the father, leaving the mother free to see her son. However, according to Elita Magomadova, the father prevented the child from communicating with the mother. When the boy's father died, he was left with his elderly paternal grandmother, and not with his mother, despite the fact that, by law, parents have the primary right to raise children. After lengthy lawsuits, Magomadova was able to defend her right to raise a child, but the court decision was not executed. According to the bailiffs, they cannot find the grandmother and the boy.