Moscow, Aug 25 (IANS) Russian Paralympic Committee chief Vladimir Lukin has said all 266 Russian para athletes could submit individual complaints to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) challenging the International Paralympic Committee's (IPC) decision to ban them from competing in the 2016 Paralympics.
The 2016 Paralympics will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from September 7-18, reports Tass.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on August 23 turned down an appeal of the Russian Paralympic Committee against the IPC decision to bar the Russian team from competing in the Paralympics.
"The ECHR should study attentively the individual complaints of 266 athletes. We consider ourselves to be absolutely innocent," Lukin said on Wednesday.
Pavel Rozhkov, the joint vice-president of the Russian Paralympic Committee, said on Wednesday that the paralympians were negotiating a possibility to file individual lawsuits.
"The paralympians are already consulting lawyers about individual lawsuits. But the situation is fundamentally different from the one involving our Olympians. The thing is that paralympians have no right to file lawsuits to CAS," Rozhkov explained.
IPC acted on a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report to suspend the Russian Paralympic Committee's membership and bar its paralympians.
The Russian Paralympic Committee (RPC) submitted an appeal to CAS on August 15.
According to CAS, RPC had failed to provide sufficient proof to refute the IPC decision.
--IANS
sam/bg
