Former Soviet guerrilla wins case against Latvia

Vasily Kononov, a Russian WW2 veteran convicted and imprisoned for genocide by a court in Riga, has won a rights case against Latvia in the European Court of Human Rights.

The Latvian authorities have been ordered to pay €30,000 in damages to the former Soviet guerrilla convicted ten years before, Lenta.ru reported.

After Latvia gained independence from the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s, Kononov was accused of ordering the killing of nine Latvian villagers in 1944. Kononov insists they were Nazi collaborators.

He was sentenced to six years in prison on genocide charges. In 2004, after years of litigation, the sentence was cut to 20 months and the charges changed to “war crimes”. As soon as the 80-year-old was freed he appealed to the European court of human rights.