ROMAN ZAKHAROV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT
53
not be submitted to the court and were thereby excluded from the scope of
judicial review.
(β) The Government
213. The Government submitted that under Russian law an individual
subject to secret surveillance measures did not have to be informed of those
measures at any point. The Constitutional Court held (see paragraph 40
above) that, in view of the necessity to keep the surveillance measures
secret, the principles of a public hearing and adversarial proceedings were
not applicable to the interception authorisation proceedings. The person
concerned was therefore not entitled to participate in the authorisation
proceedings or to be informed of the decision taken.
214. After the termination of the investigation, the defendant was
entitled to study all the materials in the criminal case-file, including the data
obtained in the course of operational-search activities. Otherwise, in cases
where the investigator decided not to open criminal proceedings against the
interception subject or to discontinue the criminal proceedings on the
grounds that the alleged offence had not been committed or one or more
elements of a criminal offence were missing, the interception subject was
entitled to request and receive information about the data collected. A
refusal to provide such information could be challenged before a court,
which had power to order the disclosure of the information if it considered
the refusal to be ill-founded. The Government submitted a copy of the
decision of 4 August 2009 by the Alekseyevskiy District Court of the
Belgorod region, ordering that the police provide, within one month, an
interception subject with information about the data collected about him in
the course of the interception “to the extent permitted by the requirements of
confidentiality and with the exception of data which could enable State
secrets to be disclosed”.
215. The Government argued that Russian law was different from the
Bulgarian law criticised by the Court in its judgment in Association for
European Integration and Human Rights and Ekimdzhiev (cited above,
§ 91) because it provided for a possibility of declassifying the interception
materials and granting the person concerned access to them. In support of
that allegation, they referred to the criminal-conviction judgment of 11 July
2012 by the Zabaykalsk Regional Court. That judgment – a copy of which
was not provided to the Court – relied, according to the Government, on a
judicial decision authorising the interception of the defendant’s telephone
communications which had been declassified and submitted to the trial
judge at his request. The Government also referred to two further judgments
– by the Presidium of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court and the Presidium of
the Supreme Court of the Mariy-El Republic – quashing, by way of
supervisory review, judicial decisions authorising the interception of
communications. They did not submit copies of those judgments.