ST. PETERSBURG, April 1 (RAPSI) – Russia’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday invalidated a regulation that denied Chernobyl cleanup worker an accompanying benefit status to members of  student construction teams who took park in cleanup operations after the 1986 nuclear plant accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, who were not dispatched there by executive decision.

The case was heard at the request of Yury Kuzichev and Sergei Plotnikov, who participated in cleanup operations at Chernobyl, but were later denied the status of official cleanup workers because they were sent to the disaster site by local Communist Party or Komsomol organizations.

An explanatory note on the list of Chernobyl cleanup operations that were conducted from April 26, 1986 to December 31, 1990, approved by parliament resolution on August 13, 1993, reads that the above status is only granted to those who were dispatched to the disaster site by executive order.

The Constitutional Court has ruled that all citizens who took part in the Chernobyl cleanup operations during the above time period were exposed to a similar risk of radiation as “official” cleanup workers, and that the regulation depriving them of that status “runs contrary to the constitutional principle of equality and creates unsubstantiated differences in the legal status of citizens who took part in the said cleanup operations.”

With the Constitutional Court’s ruling, the plaintiffs’ cases are to be retried.