MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. The decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on the Dima Yakovlev Law gives US applicants a chance to adopt Russian orphans, their lawyer Karina Moskalenko said on Tuesday.
"The ECHR’s decision gives the applicants a chance to adopt Russian orphans. They are still interested in their fate, they send parcels to them so that the children would not think that they were betrayed," Moskalenko told TASS.
The lawyer assured that she seeks "the implementation of the ECHR’s decision in full."
Earlier on Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russia’s Dima Yakovlev Law, which took effect four years ago, violated the rights of potential adoptive parents from the US and ordered Moscow to pay compensations to them.
The judges came to a conclusion that the law violates Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights and that Russia should pay 3,000 euros in compensations to each of the applicants who filed a lawsuit and also $600 for legal expenses. The ECHR ruled that rights of the children were not violated.
The lawsuit was filed jointly by 45 US citizens both personally and on behalf of 27 Russian children. The ECHR ruled that the applicants were discriminated "on grounds of their nationality"
The applicants also complained that depriving children of special medical assistance "amounted to inhuman treatment." The court rejected the claim saying that the children were provided with adequate medical assistance in Russia.
Russia’s lawmakers passed the so-called Dima Yakovlev Law that took effect in January 2013 banning US citizens from adopting children in Russia. The legislation is named after a child from northwest Russia's Pskov region who died of heat stroke four months after being adopted by a US couple when his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours.
The Dima Yakovlev Law is considered to be a response to the Magnitsky Act adopted by the US Congress in December 2012, placing sanctions on a number of Russian officials.