A WOMAN whose home was polluted by Russia’s biggest steelworks yesterday won a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights that could spawn thousands of similar lawsuits.

Nadezhda Fadeyeva, 56, sued the Government for not relocating her from her apartment, which she claimed was dangerously close to the Severstal steel plant in the central city of Cherepovets.

The mother of three had pursued the case through Russian courts since 1995, but the authorities had responded only by putting her on a waiting list to be moved away.

The court awarded Mrs Fadeyeva €6,000 (£4,000), plus legal and other expenses, and demanded that the Government take steps to improve her situation in Cherepovets, an industrial centre about 200 miles northeast of Moscow.

In one of its first rulings on an environmental case, it said that the Government “had failed to strike a fair balance between the interests of the community and the applicant’s effective enjoyment of her right to respect for her home and her private life”.

The verdict will infuriate the Russian Government, already fuming over the court’s ruling in February that it committed serious abuses, including torture and extrajudicial killing, in Chechnya.

Anxious not to push Russia too far, the court stopped short of ordering the Government to relocate Mrs Fadeyeva, but her lawyers were happy with the result. “We’re very satisfied,” Kirill Koroteyev said for the Russian human rights group Memorial, which took up the case and referred it to the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre at London Metropolitan University.

“Lots of people live in a comparable situation to Mrs Fadeyeva. Now they have a tool to fight against the companies that are polluting the air, water or soil around them.”

The Government is expected to demand a review of the ruling within the three months before it becomes binding. There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin, but Tamara Gurnyak, a lawyer who acted for the Government, said she believed that Mrs Fadeyeva’s alleged health problems — eye and nervous disorders — were caused by her earlier work in a pipe factory.

“She’s had a hard life,” she said. “I have lived all my life in the city. Yes, it’s very industrial. Yes, she’s very ill, but it’s because of her work, not because of Severstal.”

The dispute centred on whether Mrs Fadeyeva lived within a “sanitary security zone” around the Soviet-era steel plant, which is still the largest iron smelter in Russia, employing about 60,000 people. The Soviet Government established the zone covering a 5,000-metre radius around the plant in 1965 with a view to relocating everyone inside it. It never did. Mrs Fadeyeva moved into an apartment within the zone in 1985.

In 1992 the zone was reduced to a 1,000-metre radius of the plant. The plant was privatised a year later and all the apartments within the zone were handed over to the local authority.

Mrs Fadeyeva was not available for comment yesterday and, according to her lawyers, was unaware of her victory.

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