The European Court of Human Rights condemned Russia in two separate judgements Tuesday over its investigation into murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya and its treatment of the protest group Pussy Riot.

In the case of Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment building in 2006, the court ruled that Russia “had failed to take adequate investigatory steps to find the person or persons who had commissioned the murder”.

The judges at the court in Strasbourg found that Russian investigators should have explored possibilities that the crime was ordered by “agents from Russia’s FSB domestic secret service or of the administration of the Chechen Republic”.

Politkovskaya, a reporter for t