PARIS, September 21. /TASS/. Dmitry Dedov, the Russian judge of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has disagreed with the decision by the majority of judges to allow Russia’s involvement in the death of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in the UK on the claim of his ex-wife. The judge's dissenting opinion was published together with the ECHR's decision on Tuesday.
"I regret that I cannot join the conclusions of the majority in finding a violation of both the procedural and the substantive limb of Article 2 of the Convention. I am not sure that those findings have been made beyond [a] reasonable doubt. I found many deficiencies in the analysis by the British inquiry and by the Court which raise reasonable doubts as to the involvement of the suspects in the poisoning and whether they were acting as agents of the State."
Earlier, the ECHR awarded more than 100,000 euro to Litvinenko’s ex-wife Maria Carter as a compensation for moral damage. She filed a complaint against Russia. In her statement, she referred to the results of British investigators who concluded that her husband was assassinated. According to the court's decision, Russia did not conduct an effective investigation and did not bring to justice Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, who were considered the perpetrators of the crime in question by the British investigators. As a result, Russia was found guilty of violating articles 2 and 38 of the ECHR.
Having obtained asylum in the UK, Litvinenko died in the British capital on November 23, 2006. According to an expert examination, the former FSB agent was poisoned with radioactive polonium, but the circumstances of his death have not yet been established and cause controversy. A report released in January 2016 in London on the results of the so-called public investigation into Litvinenko's death emphasized that Moscow allegedly had a hand in it, and Russians Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun were named as the perpetrators of the murder. Moscow believes that London's actions to investigate the "Litvinenko case" are politically motivated.