LONDON: In the middle of the afternoon of Feb 5, 2000, when outside there were the sounds of boots crunching on snow, screams and scattered bursts of gunfire from different directions, Malika Labazanova crouched on the floor of her house at No 20, Third Tsimlyansky Lane, Grozny. A young man in camouflage fatigues held the muzzle of an automatic rifle against her head. Both were citizens of the same country, Russia, but he represented the government, and she did not.

He was young enough to be her son, she noticed; she thought it was quite likely he would kill her. He and his comrades had already shot many of the residents of this area of the city, a district called Novy Aldy, and looted their possessions. Many of them, like Labazanova, who was 50 at the time, were middle-aged or older. She had seen the new corpses. She had handed over the gold earrings her mother bought her when she was 16.

“I clutched his legs and begged him not to kill me,” she told me in Grozny. “He said, ‘If I don’t kill you, they’ll kill me.’ And he lifted his gun in the air and shot into the ceiling. I clutched him again and thanked him and he said, ‘Shut your mouth, dead one.’”

Labazanova was spared; her brother- and sister-in-law, in an adjoining house, were murdered and the building set on fire. A third relative, a 70-year-old man, was killed outside her door. Labazanova and her husband were forced to bury the bodies of their kin in their own yard.

Labazanova remembered the look of the man in military snow camouflage who led the detachment of Russian government troops through her gate. He was in his late 20s. “His eyes were transparent, like glass. Not living. He said, ‘We have orders to kill everyone’.”

A report by the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, based on eyewitness accounts, lists 56 victims of the Novy Aldy massacre by name, age and address. The killings took place after armed Chechen resistance to the Russian military had stopped, and Chechen fighters had pulled out of the area. The casually unpunished atrocity in Novy Aldy, one of a continuing series in Chechnya committed by the Russian authorities in various guises, is liable to provoke a fleeting sense of outrage and powerlessness in the hearts of concerned, liberal west Europeans. Like Guantánamo, Palestine and Tibet, Chechnya has the aura of a faraway place where an insecure, heavily armed government shrugs its shoulders in the face of impotent Europeans bleating about human rights.

Chechnya is different. It is no longer possible for western Europe to shake its head and turn away. A decision made 10 years ago locked Russia, and Chechnya with it, into a firm judicial embrace with the rest of the continent. Since 1996, when Russia joined a structure called the Council of Europe, every Russian citizen, including everyone who lives in Chechnya, has had as much right as the residents of Bournemouth to appeal against official injustice, over the heads of their national governments, to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The name of the neat, prosperous French city scarcely any Chechen has ever seen has been echoing in the ruins of Grozny since the Russian shelling ended in 2000. A significant number of Chechens have come to regard Strasbourg as their only hope for justice.

Thirteen of the dead in Novy Aldy were 60 or older. Seven were in their 70s. One was a year-old baby. Six were women, one of them nine months pregnant. Witnesses describe systematic pillaging and looting by Russian troops. The Memorial report, which has been available for more than five years, includes facsimiles of Russian government documents confirming that “mass murder of innocent civilians” by Russian troops took place, and identifying the units responsible — detachments of riot police from the northern cities of Ryazan and St Petersburg.

Video film exists of the aftermath of the slaughter. In spite of this weight of evidence, and a slew of other investigations by foreign and Russian journalists and by human rights organisations, no official investigation of the crime has ever been completed; nobody has been arrested; nobody has been charged.

“If Strasbourg closes its eyes, then there will be no one left to believe,” Labazanova said.

After a five-year wait, Labazanova heard in December that the European Court would issue a ruling on her complaint, along with those of four other victims, about the Novy Aldy massacre and Russia’s failure to investigate it. Dozens more Chechen cases are working their way through the court’s process. Last year, the court announced its first verdicts in cases involving six Chechens — for the Chechens, and against the Russian government, in each case. Yusup Musayev, 65, had seven relatives and two neighbours slaughtered in the street on the day of the massacre in Novy Aldy. Three days later, he said, he watched as Russian troops, including some of those involved in the killings, turned up in a heavy truck and looted his home of anything of value. His case is one of those, along with Labazanova’s, that Strasbourg has agreed to rule on. I found Musayev in his house on Voronezh Street with his older brother Ibragim, whose son, Suleiman, was killed in the massacre. With so many dwellings destroyed or damaged in Grozny, the Musayevs are lucky to have a big, traditional Chechen house, built around a partly roofed-over courtyard, behind a high, solid metal gate. It’s the kind of house designed to be lived in by several large, related families, but it has an empty feel with only the two pensioners rattling around in it.

Over tea and biscuits we talked about the curious situation in which an overworked court in Alsace, France, which has no investigators of its own and seldom calls witnesses to give evidence in person, has become, by default, the last faint chance of establishing responsibility for one of the worst massacres of civilians in Europe since the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. “We don’t have any particular hopes yet,” said Musayev. “Let’s see what happens once Strasbourg announces its verdict.”

Ibragim Musayev was hungry for hope. “We believe that this court will do something for the sake of justice. Because here it’s hopeless,” he said. “What court in Russia could you appeal to?” At the same time, he knows that hope is dangerous. “I don’t really believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe the European Court has the power to make Russia go on bended knee.”

This is the dilemma of the Russia test, the test of whether there is such a thing as “European values”. Declaring the Russian government guilty in Strasbourg offers western Europe both the chance of success and the chance of shame. If, by patient nagging and judicious pressure, west European governments push Russia to accept the verdicts of the European Court and reform its brutal security forces, its noxious jails and corrupt local authorities, it proves that there is a European way of changing undemocratic governments.

But if Russia fails to respond to Strasbourg by reopening investigations into atrocities, and if western European governments take no action, the idea of “European values” looks as sullied in the grime of Chechnya as America’s claim to moral leadership is after Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service