UN panel faults Russia's support for human rights

By DOUGLAS BIRCH and ELIANE ENGELER, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW – From Russia's North Caucasus to the streets of Moscow, those who find themselves at odds with authorities can wind up as targets of deadly violence. So increasingly, some are working quietly or have abandoned their efforts altogether.

On Friday a new U.N. Human Rights Committee report on Russia called for a series of sweeping legal reforms, saying the country is still struggling to guarantee some of the most basic rights, including to a fair trial, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Meanwhile a spate of killings has forced Memorial, one of Russia's leading human rights organizations, and the crusading newspaper Novaya Gazeta, to pull out of the Russian region of Chechnya. Young people are now thinking twice before volunteering to work with rights groups, said Lev Ponomaryov, director of the group For Human Rights.

"It is marginalizing the human rights movement," Ponomaryov said.

The pullback by activists comes at a time when President Dmitry Medvedev has spoken out forcefully in the defense of the rule of law and democratic freedoms. But his critics say he has done little so far to back up his rhetoric.

Friday's U.N. report found that Russia still fails to protect journalists, activists, prison inmates and others from a wide range of abuses, including torture and murder.

The authors, an 18-member panel of independent experts, urged the Kremlin and parliament to make sweeping changes in the laws, including narrowing the current broad legal definitions of terrorism and extremism, decriminalizing defamation cases against journalists and granting people forced into psychiatric hospitals by the courts the right to appeal.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said Friday he hadn't seen the report and could not comment.

Perhaps the report's harshest criticism was aimed at the Russian justice system in Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus region.

The panel cited reports of torture, forced disappearance, arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killing in those area, allegedly committed by the military and security services, saying the perpetrators "appear to enjoy widespread impunity" from punishment for their actions.

While the report did not cite specific cases or statistics, it alluded to the unsolved killings of a number of journalists and human rights activists, including the October 2006 shooting of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a Kremlin foe who exposed widespread human-rights abuses and corruption in Chechnya.

In July of this year, Natalya Estemirova, who sometimes wrote for Politkovskaya's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was kidnapped in front of her apartment building in the Chechen capital, Grozny, by four men. Her body was later found riddled with bullets in a field. There have been no arrests in the case.

Since Estemirova's killing, Novaya Gazeta does not feel it has the right to put anyone at risk by sending them to Chechnya, Sergei Sokolov, a deputy editor, told journalists recently.

Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the PEN American Center on Thursday sent a letter to Medvedev demanding that those responsible for the death of Estemirova be brought to justice.

The letter said Estemirova had "accumulated a damning body of evidence linking human rights crimes to Chechen authorities, particularly the militia of local President Ramzan Kadyrov." It called her the 18th journalist murdered in Russia "in direct retaliation for her work" since 2000, and said that in each case those who ordered the killings have escaped conviction.

In Russia outside of the North Caucasus, the impact of the journalist and activist slayings have been subtler but still significant. Most veteran human rights activists are still at work, Ponomaryov said. But fear of violence is driving away a lot of the young volunteers who once contributed to the movement.

"We cannot increase the number of volunteers who work with us, because their parents can tell these young people that it is dangerous, don't do it," Ponomaryov said.

The author and journalist Yulia Latynina said the recent killings have been "fairly disastrous" for Russia's community of rights activists and journalists. But she said that it was wrong to suspect Russia's federal government of complicity, instead blaming most violence on criminal gangs and powerful regional political figures who are beyond the state's control.

"The spate of killings has nothing to do with the state itself, but it has to do with people who can get away with murder," she said.

Latynina cited the most recent killing, that of Maksharip Aushev, a journalist and activist with close ties to the current president of the violence-plagued Russian region of Ingushetia. Aushev died Sunday in a fusillade from a passing car while driving along the Caucasus' main highway.

Latynina said he was killed hours after appearing on a Russian television channel accusing a previous Ingush administration of corruption, and she suspects those remarks helped trigger his death.

The U.N. report didn't just focus on attacks on journalists. It held Russia responsible for reported attacks on civilians by armed groups in South Ossetia in the aftermath of the August 2008 war with Georgia, saying Russia should have moved to stop them, and called for Moscow to investigate those abuses.

It also urged the government to take action against what the panel called an increasing number of hate crimes and racially motivated attacks.

The expert panel said it was concerned about violence against lesbian, gay and bisexual persons, including reports of police harassment, adding it was concerned at the "systematic discrimination against individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation" in Russia.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in the 1990s, but many Russians are vehemently opposed to expansion of gay rights or gay-rights demonstrations. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is an outspoken foe of gay rights and always has blocked attempts to hold gay pride marches in the capital.

The U.N. panel, which assessed how five countries, including Russia, comply with an international treaty on civil and political rights, receives its information from various U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations.