Court says massacre of Poles was a war crime

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia had violated the rights of relatives of thousands of Poles who were killed by the Soviet secret police in 1940, and described the Katyn massacre as a “war crime”.

Yesterday’s ruling followed a complaint by 15 descendants of 12 victims over the adequacy of Russia’s inquiry into the massacre, in which about 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered without trial. Many were shot in the back of the head.

In a statement, the court said: “[The applicants] suffered a double trauma: losing their relatives in the war and not being allowed to learn the truth about their death for more than 50 years.”

The document added: “It [the court] found that the mass murder of the Polish prisoners by the Soviet secret police had been a war crime.”

After initially blaming the killings on Poland’s wartime Nazi occupiers, the Soviet Union accepted responsibility in 1990, beginning an investigation that was abandoned in 2004.

In recent years, Russia has released some documents regarding the massacre and the later investigation, but others still remain classified and inaccessible to the Polish side. The 1940 Katyn massacre remains a stumbling block in bilateral ties between Warsaw and Moscow.

Welcoming the ruling, Marcin Bosacki, a spokesman for Poland’s foreign ministry, said: “It is an important fact that the Katyn massacre is now recognised as a war crime in the understanding of international law.”

The court said: “The approach chosen by the Russian military courts to maintain to the applicants’ face …that their relatives had somehow vanished in the Soviet camps demonstrated a callous disregard for the applicants’ concerns.”