CCPR/C/127/D/2912/2016 2.7 On 13 April 1990, the Soviet news agency TASS announced publicly that Beria and his subordinates bore direct responsibility for the executions in the Katyn forest and that the Soviet side expressed deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy. 2.8 On 22 March 1990, the office of the Kharkov prosecutor opened a criminal investigation into the discovery of the mass graves of Polish citizens in the city’s wooded park. On 20 August 1990, the criminal investigation was directed against Beria and other NKVD officials who were ranked as military officials. On 27 September 1990, the investigation was taken over by the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor of the Soviet Union, who commenced investigation No. 159. 2.9 In the summer and autumn of 1991, Polish and Russian specialists carried out the exhumations of corpses at the mass burial sites in Kharkov, Mednoye and Katyn. They also reviewed the archive documents relating to the Katyn massacre, interviewed at least 40 witnesses and commissioned forensic examinations. Twenty-two bodies were identified on the basis of military identification tags. 2.10 On 17 March 1992, a Russian commission of experts was set up to assess the conclusions that should be drawn from the materials and evidence gathered in the course of investigation No. 159. On 13 June 1993, the head of the prosecutors conducting the investigation filed a motion for a procedural decision to discontinue the investigation because the perpetrators were all deceased. He suggested that Stalin and his collaborators in the Politburo be considered guilty of crimes against peace and humanity, of war crimes and of genocide against Polish citizens on the basis of articles 6 (a), (b) and (c) of the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. He also suggested that the members of the Burdenko Commission were guilty of abuse of power and argued that those who carried out the illegal orders should have been subject to grave penalties, including the death penalty. The motion was rejected by the Chief Military Prosecutor. 2.11 The Government of the Russian Federation acknowledged in several decisions that the Polish citizens shot following the Politburo decision of 5 March 1940 were victims of political repression. On 19 October 1996, decision No. 1247 was adopted to establish memorials on the burial sites of Soviet and Polish citizens who had been victims of totalitarian repression in Katyn and Mednoye. 2.12 On 21 September 2004, the Chief Military Prosecutor discontinued investigation No. 159 because the perpetrators were all deceased. That decision was classified as containing State secrets, together with 116 volumes of the investigation (out of a total of 183 volumes). The decision was announced on 11 March 2005 by the Chief Military Prosecutor. He stated that it had been established that there had been 14,542 prisoners on the territory of the former Soviet Union and that the death of 1,803 of them had been proven. The massacre was declared not to amount to genocide and because of the death of the guilty officials, there was no basis to consider it in judicial terms. 2.13 Most of the authors applied repeatedly to various Russian authorities for information on the Katyn criminal investigation. On 21 April 1998, O.W., the mother of W.W-J., received a response to her request for the rehabilitation of her husband, W.W., from the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor. The response noted that W.W. had been held as a prisoner of war in the Kozelsk camp and had been executed in 1940, along with other prisoners, but that the question of his rehabilitation could only be considered after investigation No. 159 had concluded. On 18 January 2006, the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor denied the request for rehabilitation on the basis that it was impossible to establish the legal grounds on which W.W. had been sentenced to death. 2.14 The authors instituted two sets of proceedings in Russia: on the rehabilitation of their relatives who had been killed, in accordance with the provisions of the 1991 Rehabilitation Act; and on the decision to discontinue the investigation. On 21 February 2008, the authors filed a request for the rehabilitation of their relatives with the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor. On 13 March 2008, the Office of the Chief Military Prosecutor refused to examine their motions on the merits. The Office informed the authors that the joint investigation by the Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian law enforcement agencies had not uncovered the criminal files and other documents on the basis of which the decisions to execute the victims in 1940 had been made and that any possibility of retrieving those files had since been lost. In the absence of such files, it was not possible to decide whether the Rehabilitation Act would be applicable to the relatives 3