PART 2: How to Bring a Case to the Court By contrast, in the case of Edwards v. the United Kingdom,497 the Court held that it was reasonable for the applicants to have awaited for a long period for the outcome of a non-statutory inquiry set up to investigate the circumstances of the death on 29 November 1994 of their son in prison. Although in this case the applicants had waited for a period of over four years before introducing their application they were found by the Court to have been justified in doing so. Had the applicants chosen to introduce their application prior to the publication of the Inquiry Report, there would have been a strong argument for finding that their complaints concerning the substantive and procedural aspects of Article 2 of the Convention were premature.498 The Court reached a similar conclusion in the case of Dovletukayev and Others v. Russia.499 This case originated in an application by close relatives of five men who were allegedly abducted by State agents in Chechnya and whose bodies were subsequently discovered under various circumstances; one was never discovered. The Court examined the record in detail and held the conduct of the applicants vis-à-vis the investigation in each of their criminal cases has been determined not by their perception of the remedy as ineffective, but rather by their expectation that the authorities would, of their own motion, provide them with an adequate answer in the face of their serious complaints. They furnished the investigative authorities with timely and sufficiently detailed accounts of their relatives’ abductions, assisted them with finding witnesses and other evidence and fully cooperated in other ways.[500] They thus reasonably expected further substantive developments from the investigation. It could not be said that they failed to show the requisite diligence by waiting for the pending investigation to yield results.[501] The Court thus considers that investigations were being conducted, albeit sporadically, during the periods in question, and that the applicants did all that could be expected of them to assist the authorities.502 There may also be circumstances in which an applicant has doubts about the effectiveness of a particular domestic remedy even before he or she instigates it. Time spent on exhausting a remedy which, according to the Court’s case law, is considered an extraordinary remedy and which therefore need not be exhausted, may result in the application being declared inadmissible for non-respect of the six-month rule. The Court stated in the case of Berdzenishvili v. Russia that applications for a retrial made to domestic courts or authorities, or similar extraordinary remedies, cannot, Edwards v. the United Kingdom (dec.), no. 46477/99, 7 June 2001. Ibid. Dovletukayev and Others v. Russia, nos. 7821/07, 10937/10, 14046/10 and 32782/10, 24 October 2013. The Court distinguished these facts from Nasirkhayeva v. Russia (dec.), no. 1721/07, 31 May 2011, where the applicant lodged her complaint with domestic authorities six years after the events. 501 See, mutatis mutandis, Abuyeva and Others v. Russia, no. 27065/05, 2 December 2010, § 179. 502 Dovletukayev and Others v. Russia, nos. 7821/07, 10937/10, 14046/10 and 32782/10, 24 October 2013, §§ 181–182. 497 498 499 500 137