Background
Valentina Cuşnir, a Moldovan member of parliament born in 1954, was present in central Chișinău on the night of 7–8 April 2009 during mass protests that erupted following disputed parliamentary elections. After a news conference earlier that day in which a police colonel publicly accused her of inciting protesters, she encountered balaclava-clad special forces officers beating young demonstrators near the main square. According to her account, two police colonels — D.R. and P.C. — grabbed her by the hand and hair, dragged her to the ground, and struck her on the hip and nape of the neck until she lost consciousness. She was treated by ambulance services on 8 April 2009, and a forensic examination conducted on 10 August 2009 confirmed injuries of medium severity, including a radial styloid fracture, head trauma and concussion, and bruising — all caused by a blunt object requiring more than 21 days of treatment.
The applicant filed a formal complaint on 16 April 2009, but a criminal investigation was not opened until 29 June 2009 — nearly three months after the incident — and she was not recognised as a victim until 21 July 2009. The two named suspects were not questioned until approximately five and seven months after the assault. The investigation was further complicated by the disappearance from the case file of three CDs containing security camera footage from around the square, a missing ambulance medical report, and the prosecution’s failure to formally list the video recordings as evidence. The charges against the suspects were also amended without notifying the applicant or her lawyer until after the investigation had closed.
Domestic courts acquitted both suspects. The Chișinău District Court (Buiucani district) acquitted them on 6 August 2014 for lack of direct evidence, noting contradictions in the applicant’s account and the absence of eyewitness testimony. The Chișinău Court of Appeal upheld the acquittal on 13 December 2016, adding that the prosecution’s failure to seek re-examination of the suspects on appeal was tantamount to abandoning the accusation. The Supreme Court of Justice dismissed the applicant’s cassation appeal on 30 May 2017 as time-barred, and rejected the prosecutor’s appeal on the merits.
The Court’s Holding
The European Court of Human Rights unanimously found a violation of the procedural limb of Article 3 of the Convention (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment), holding that Moldova had failed to conduct an effective investigation into the applicant’s credible and medically confirmed allegations of police ill-treatment. The Court dismissed the Government’s preliminary objection that the applicant had failed to exhaust domestic remedies by missing the cassation deadline, finding that her request for additional time — made within the 30-day window and in circumstances where the Court of Appeal itself took over a month to produce a reasoned judgment — was not unreasonable, and that the prosecutor’s timely appeal had in any event allowed the Supreme Court to examine the full merits.
On the substance, the Court identified a combination of serious investigative failures. The criminal investigation was not opened for nearly three months after the police had been notified of the assault on the very day it occurred; the suspects were not questioned for five to seven months; the applicant was not timely informed of the change in charges against them; and the prosecution failed to properly list key video evidence. Most significantly, the Court found that security camera recordings had temporarily disappeared from the case file, breaking the chain of custody and undermining the evidentiary value of that material. A witness who testified to seeing P.C. drag a woman along the ground was never addressed by the domestic courts in their reasoning.
The Court awarded the applicant EUR 7,500 in non-pecuniary damages and EUR 2,000 in costs and expenses, to be paid by Moldova within three months, with default interest at the European Central Bank marginal lending rate plus three percentage points thereafter. The remainder of the applicant’s just satisfaction claim was dismissed.
Key Takeaways
- An Article 3 procedural violation can arise from the cumulative effect of investigative failures — including unjustified delays in opening proceedings, late questioning of identified suspects, and mishandling of evidence — even where domestic courts ultimately acquit the accused after a full trial.
- The disappearance and reappearance of key evidence (here, three CDs of security camera footage) without explanation breaks the chain of custody and itself constitutes an investigative failure incompatible with Article 3’s procedural obligations.
- Domestic courts’ failure to engage with relevant witness testimony — such as an eyewitness who saw one suspect drag a woman along the ground — is a further element undermining the effectiveness of the investigation.
- The exhaustion-of-domestic-remedies rule must be applied flexibly: where a court delays producing its reasoned judgment and an applicant requests more time within the formal deadline, rejecting the application solely on timeliness grounds will not bar the Strasbourg claim, particularly where a co-appellant’s timely appeal allowed full merits review.
Why It Matters
This judgment arises from the Moldovan authorities’ sweeping crackdown following the April 2009 post-election protests — events the Court has addressed in multiple prior cases, including Taraburca v. Moldova and Boboc and Others v. the Republic of Moldova. The ruling reinforces that Article 3’s procedural obligation is not satisfied merely by opening an investigation and eventually reaching a verdict; the investigation must be prompt, thorough, and conducted in a manner that maintains the integrity of evidence and keeps victims meaningfully informed. The disappearance of evidentiary material from official case files is treated with particular seriousness.
For practitioners, the case illustrates that a combination of individually familiar deficiencies — delayed commencement, late suspect interviews, evidence-handling lapses, inadequate victim participation — can collectively produce a procedural Article 3 violation even when acquittals result from proceedings that nominally ran their full course. It also offers a useful precedent on the proportionate application of the exhaustion rule where procedural obstacles are partly of the respondent state’s own making.