Penguin
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Soviet Russia Today: Lies about Katyn revealedLies about Katyn revealed
Evgeny Novikov. June 18, 2012 the Court took a sensational decision that granted under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, "documents", pointing out that in the execution of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn blame Stalin and the Soviet side, were fake. Silent PC liberal "Echo of Moscow" silent "Facets" silent "Novaya gazeta". But this top-level international sensation. Now what to do with all these?
Russia is not responsible for the mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn - this decision was made recently, the European Court of Human Rights. Decision sensational: it turns out that the last 20 years the management of our country tirelessly kayalos of a crime in the 40's made by someone else. It turns out that the documents on the Katyn massacre, which appeared in the late 80's out of the sleeve Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, no more than a fake - the court did not even took them into consideration.
mmmm, funny.... can't find the alleged (by Evgeny Novikov) EUCHR decision in its case law files ...
A search of the EUCHR caselaw notes for 2012 reveals only 3 hits on the workd Katyn. All deal with:
Failure adequately to account for fate of Polish prisoners executed by Soviet secret police at
Katyń in 1940: violation
Janowiec and Others v. Russia, nos. 55508/07 and 29520/09, 16 April 2012
On 24 September 2012 the case was referred to the Grand Chamber at the request of the applicants
supported by the Polish Government.
This is confirmed in a variety of documents. See
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/CLIN_INDEX_2012_ENG_904387.pdf
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/CLIN_2012_09_155_ENG.pdf
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Annual_report_2012_ENG.pdf
Admissibility checked via Hudoc
http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#{"display":["1"],"dmdocnumber":["888268"]}
This is in fact the only hit in HUDOC on Katyn
The Country profile of Russia yields:
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/CP_Russia_ENG.pdf (page 2)Janowiec and Others v. Russia
21.10.2013
The case concerned complaints by relatives of victims of the 1940 Katyń massacre – the killing of several thousands of Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) – that the Russian authorities’ investigation into the massacre had been inadequate.
The Court held:
By a majority, that it had no competence to examine the complaints under Article 2 (right to life);
By a majority, that there had been no violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading Treatment);
Unanimously, that Russia had failed to comply with its obligations under Article 38 (obligation to furnish necessary facilities for examination of the case).
Press release available in Polish and Russian.
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/CP_Russia_ENG.pdf (page 12)Dzhugashvili v. Russia
09.12.2014
The case concerned articles published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper about the shooting of Polish prisoners of war in Katyń in 1940 and the role which the former Soviet leaders had allegedly played in the tragedy. The applicant, the grandson of the former Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, sued the newspaper for defamation of his grandfather, without success.
Application declared inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded.
Here is the verdict by the Grand Chamber in 2013 on the Janowiec case
http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf?library=ECHR&id=003-4541478-5482631&filename=Grand%20Chamber%20judgment%20Janowiec%20and%20Others%20v.%20Russia%20-%20judgment%20delivery.pdf
From this:
The bolded statement of this 2013 ruling do not suggest that there is any doubt on the part of ERCHR on who committed the Katyn massacre (which you would have expected had the court ruled in 2012 that Katyn was not on the shoulders of the NKVD but rather the Polish state)In 1990 the USSR officially acknowledged the responsibility of the Soviet leaders for the killing of
Polish prisoners of war and a criminal investigation into the mass murders was started. The
proceedings lasted until September 2004 when the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office
decided to discontinue it. In December 2004, 36 out of a total of 183 volumes of files from the
investigation were classified as “top secret”. The text of the decision to discontinue the Katyń
criminal investigation was also classified.
...
On 26 November 2010, the Russian Duma adopted a statement about the “Katyń tragedy”, in which
it reiterated that the “mass extermination of Polish citizens on USSR territory during the Second
World War” had been carried out on Stalin’s orders and that it was necessary to continue “verifying
the lists of victims, restoring the good names of those who perished in Katyń and other places, and
uncovering the circumstances of the tragedy...".
...
Decision of the Court
...
Article 3
In its case-law, the Court had accepted that the suffering of family members of a “disappeared
person”, who had gone through a long period of alternating hope and despair, might justify finding a
violation of Article 3 on account of the indifferent attitude of the authorities towards their quests for
information. However, in the applicants’ case, the Court’s jurisdiction only extended to the period
starting in May 1998, the date of the entry into force of the Convention in Russia. After that date, no
lingering uncertainty as to the fate of Polish prisoners of war had remained. Even though not all of
the bodies had been recovered, their death had been publicly acknowledged by the Soviet and
Russian authorities and had become an established historical fact. It necessarily followed that what
could initially have been a “disappearance” case had to be considered a “confirmed death” case.
The magnitude of the crime committed in 1940 by the Soviet authorities was a powerful emotional
factor. However, from a purely legal point of view, the Court could not accept it as a reason for
departing from its case-law on the status of family members of “disappeared persons” and
conferring that status on the applicants, for whom the death of their relatives was a certainty. The
Court therefore considered that their suffering had not reached a dimension and character distinct
from the emotional distress inevitably caused to relatives of victims of a serious human rights
violation. The Court accordingly found no violation of Article 3.
...
Article 38
...
While the Court was not well equipped to challenge the judgment by national authorities that
security considerations were involved, the concept of the rule of law required that measures
affecting fundamental human rights had to be subject to some form of adversarial proceedings
before an independent body competent to review the reasons for such a decision. However, the
Russian courts’ judgments in the declassification proceedings did not contain a substantive analysis
of the reasons for maintaining the classified status. The courts had referred to an expert report
issued by the Russian Federal Security Service which had found that the decision terminating the
criminal proceedings included material which had not been declassified, but they had not scrutinised
the assertion that that material should be kept secret more than 70 years after the events.
Moreover, the courts had not addressed in substance Memorial’s argument that the decision
brought to an end the investigation into a mass murder of unarmed prisoners, one of the most
serious violations of human rights committed on orders from the highest-ranking Soviet officials.
Finally, they had not performed a balancing exercise between the alleged need to protect the
information held by the Federal Security Service (a successor to the Soviet KGB which had carried
out the execution of the Polish prisoners of war), on the one hand, and the public interest in a
transparent investigation into the crimes of the previous totalitarian regime, on the other hand.
Case closed.
wikipedia? LOL .... Try use that in any accredited institution and see how quickly your work will be blacklisted and thrown out.
Up to six in ten articles on Wikipedia contain factual errors | Daily Mail Online
Wikipedia info on global warming unreliable: Study | Zee News
Speaking as a PhD: Only if you are an idiot and can't tell what kinds of sources are appropriate to use at what stages of your (academic) research!
You don't go refer to an encyclopedia (not even Encyclopedia Britannica) in an academic paper. But that doesn't mean academics do not or cannot use them..
What's Wrong with Wikipedia?
There's nothing more convenient than Wikipedia if you're looking for some quick information, and when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research), you may get what you need from Wikipedia. In fact, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts.
Nevertheless, when you're doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. (Case in point: Four years ago, an Expos student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a small town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry.) Some information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not review the site's entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this source for your essays.
The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the library is stocked with introductory materials, and the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.
What's Wrong with Wikipedia? § Harvard Guide to Using Sources
... and who am I to argue with Harvard University Library?
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