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Stuffed animals lying beside a plaque of victims’ names Monday at the Dubrovka theater, where Chechen terrorists took hundreds of hostages on Oct. 26, 2002. The justice minister said new legislation was being drafted to boost the amount of compensation offered to victims of terrorism.
On the seventh anniversary of the Dubrovka theater siege, Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov said Monday that his ministry was working on legislation to increase compensation for those injured or killed in terrorist attacks “in accordance with the practice of the European Court of Human Rights.”
The law currently obliges regional authorities to provide compensation to victims and their families, and the amount is rarely more than several thousand dollars per person.
In comparison, victims of the 2004 bombings in Madrid were ordered compensation of 30,000 euros to 1.5 million euros ($45,000 to $2.2 million).
The new Russian law would transfer at least some of the responsibility for payments to the federal government, and the amount of the compensation would be close if not equal to the European level, Konovalov said. “Mathematics can’t be applied to the sum of the compensation. Each case is unique and tragic because it is hard to evaluate such suffering,” Konovalov said. “Yet, we are going to orient ourselves to the practice of the European Court of Human Rights. It is already developed.”
Konovalov said a draft bill was being discussed by various government agencies, and the most complicated negotiations were expected to take place with the Finance Ministry, which has to sign off on all federal spending.
Relatives of hostages who died in Dubrovka were mortified with the 50,000 to 100,000 rubles ($1,730 to $3,460) offered by Moscow city authorities and sued. But the courts sided with city officials, who maintained that it was the federal government that was responsible for the war in Chechnya and its consequences. Most of the 129 hostages who died were killed by a knockout gas that special forces pumped into the theater to free the hostages from their Chechen captors.
Hundreds of people paid their respects to the dead Monday at a monument at the theater, laying flowers and stuffed animals.
