„Mrs Marie von Dardel-Dupuy, the niece of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, a World War II hero who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust and disappeared in a Soviet prison in 1947, appealed to the Moscow City Court yesterday, 18 October, to overturn an earlier decision by the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow. Last September, the court had upheld the refusal of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) to grant access to important documents about Wallenberg and to publish uncensored copies.
The decision to appeal the judgement was announced by Ivan Pavlov, JD, PhD, lawyer and head of Team 29, a group of lawyers from St. Petersburg, Russia, representing Ms von Dardel-Dupuy in the case. „The question of Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is one of the greatest mysteries in modern Russian history. The documents that my client has requested are already 70 years old, so she should be granted direct access,“ explains Pavlov.
„Despite numerous requests and applications that Wallenberg’s immediate family and historians have made to the Russian government authorities over the past decades, the Russian authorities still refuse to provide the documents in question. An attempt to gain access to the information through the courts has so far been unsuccessful, but we will challenge the court’s decision; if necessary, all the way to the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights.“
