Submitted by crinadmin on
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the detention of four children of Chechen origin who sought asylum in Belgium was unlawful. In the case of Muskhadyhiyeva and others v. Belgium, a woman and her four children were refused refugee status after arriving in Belgium from a refugee camp in Poland where they had lived after fleeing Grozny, Chechnya, in 2006. The family was held in a closed transit centre near Brussels airport. Several independent reports had found the centre unsuitable for housing children. A request to release the applicants was rejected by the Brussels Court of First Instance on 5 January 2007 and again by the Brussels Court of Appeal on 23 January 2007. Between the two decisions, NGO Médecins sans frontières carried out a psychological examination of the applicants and found that the children in particular were showing serious psychological and psycho-traumatic symptoms and should be released to limit the damage. On 24 January 2007 the applicants were sent back to Poland. On the same day they lodged a cassation appeal. By a decision of 21 March 2007 the Court of Cassation found the appeal devoid of purpose as the applicants had already been removed from the country. A report drawn up by a psychologist in Poland on 27 March 2007 confirmed that one of the children was in very critical psychological state and confirmed that the deterioration might have been caused by the detention in Belgium. The European Court of Human Rights found the State of Belgium in breach of Articles 3 and 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
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