Stalin grandson loses action against Russian newspaper at ECHR
BRUSSELS. Jan 15 (Interfax) - The European Court of Human Rights said on Thursday that it upholds Russian court rulings that threw out two suits from Josef Stalin's grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili against Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
The Russian rulings reflected a just balance between respect for one's private life and respect for journalists' freedom of expression, and so the ECHR rejected Dzhugashvili's appeals against them, the European court said in a statement.
It said the judgment was definitive and could not be appealed.
The reason for Dzhugashvili's complaints were two articles published in Novaya Gazeta in April 2009. The articles described the role of Stalin and other Soviet leaders in mass executions of Polish war prisoners in Katyn, near Smolensk, in 1940.
Russian courts threw out both suits from Dzhugashvili in 2009.
The former Soviet Union for decades refused to admit that the Polish prisoners, shot by firing squads in a forest, were executed by Soviet secret police NKVD. In post-Soviet Russia, the case was taken up by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office but the latter closed it under a classified order in 2004.
In April 2010, by order of then president Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's Federal Archival Agency (Rosarkhiv) for the first time publicized documents on the Katyn executions from the so-called "Special Folder No. 1." Rosarkhiv posted electronic copies of the documents on its website.
In May that year, Medvedev handed over 67 volumes of the Katyn case to Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski.