Betcha Scalia will change his mind about using decisions by foreign courts as precedent after reading this...
Russia's Last Czar Exonerated By Court
Ruling a Victory For Descendants
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 2, 2008; A18
MOSCOW, Oct. 1 -- Russia's Supreme Court on Wednesday recognized the nation's last czar, Nicholas II, and his family as victims of "groundless repression," formally rehabilitating the Romanovs more than 90 years after their execution in a basement in the eastern Urals signaled the Soviet embrace of terror as state policy.
The court ruling is the latest act in Russia's reinterpretation of history following the fall of the communist government in 1991. Many of the tens of millions of people shot or sent to prison camps under communist rule were officially exonerated after the Soviet collapse, but the government had long resisted that step for the autocrat the Soviets once vilified as "Bloody Nicholas."
The decision, culminating a prolonged legal battle by the descendants of the royal family, reverses a ruling by the same court last November that the Romanovs were not eligible for rehabilitation because they had never been officially accused of a crime. The court said at the time that their deaths amounted to premeditated murder, not political repression.
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