This is because only 1 percent of verdicts passed in Russia are not guilty, according to official statistics.

Navalny’s conviction could put him in jail for ten years and would cause him to be ineligible to run for office, a recently announced ambition of his.

According to The Moscow Times,

The issue of such a large number of guilty verdicts has not gone unnoticed by the country’s leaders, who seem to be aware that the integrity of Russia’s justice system is one of the main concerns of foreign investors.

During his visit to the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, a meeting attended by many politicians and foreign investors, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev addressed the issue of Russia’s high rate of guilty verdicts, calling it an ”issue of political and legal consciousness.”

As one explanation for judges’ frequent guilty rulings, Medevedev said “judges are almost ashamed of not-guilty verdicts, as it calls the work of investigative agencies into question,” Swiss newspaper Neue ZЯrcher Zeitung reported in January.

Cooperation that is too close between law enforcement authorities and courts has been confirmed by observers, with prosecutors and investigators no longer making a secret of it.

At the meeting with judge Yegorova, Sergei Kudneyev, a chief Moscow prosecutor, said prosecutors had started to become more involved in judicial practice, forming “judicial bodies” in courts.

As an example, he cited hearings in the high-profile Bolotnaya case, in which nearly 30 people have been charged with or convicted of participating in riots on Bolotnaya Ploshchad last May at a protest rally on the eve of Putin’s inauguration.

“They are not even prosecutors, but more like court officials, and it’s no secret that when there are vacancies in courts they are filled with prosecutors,” Kudneyev said. “We have a common mentality,” he added.

Anatoly Yakunin, a top Interior Ministry official, said at the same meeting that he aimed to continue cooperation with courts, emulating his predecessor and current Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

“This love will continue. We can’t exist without one another — that is a fact,” he said, adding that law enforcement officials often needed consultations in courts.

The former Interior Ministry official said the Investigative Committee makes frequent phone calls to Moscow courts to ask judges what is missing in a given case to secure a guilty verdict.

Veteran trial lawyer and human rights activist Valery Borshchyov said investigators have a direct influence on courts in Russia. “An investigator is the dominant person in court. The judge accepts the detention measures suggested by investigators; he protects him from the wrong questions and witnesses. The investigator is the main person encroaching on justice [in courts],” he said.

Even former judge Kolokolov acknowledged that the function of courts had become limited to imposing penalties…

But more often, Kolokolov said, there is simply psychological pressure on judges. “Imagine you’re a judge in a district court and you receive a criminal case that says it was investigated personally by Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, and the charges were approved by Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. Is it possible that this paper wouldn’t influence the judge’s decision? It’s purely a psychological influence; no one actually forces a judge to violate the law and pronounce a guilty verdict.”

Read the rest of the article here.

The Moldovan authorities must ensure that yesterday’s historic Pride march in the capital Chisinau is the “first of many” and is followed up by other steps in combating homophobic discrimination, Amnesty International said today.

Around 100 people participated in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) Pride parade, the first such event in Moldova.

The march, which was organized by Gender-Doc Moldova, a national NGO working on LGBTI issues, was stopped early due to threats from counter-demonstrators.

“This is a red-letter day for LGBTI rights in Moldova; now the authorities must publicly support Pride marches and enable this event to be the first of many of its kind,” said Amnesty International’s David Diaz-Jogeix, Deputy Director of Europe and Central Asia Programme.

“The abrupt ending of the march shows more still needs to be done in the fight against discrimination in Moldova. If the LGBTI movement is allowed to blossom, a more tolerant society will follow.”

Sunday’s march passed off peacefully but was curtailed after counter demonstrators found out where the event was being held.

Before the parade, an Orthodox Bishop from the city of Bălţi called on priests, Afghanistan war veterans and Chisinau residents to resist the march.

Around a thousand counter-demonstrators gathered in the city centre on Sunday to protest against the march and the Law on Ensuring Equality – the anti-discrimination legislation that came into effect in January.

Amnesty International has called on the Moldovan authorities to amend the law so that it clamps down on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in all areas of life.

Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is explicitly prohibited only in employment, while discrimination on the grounds of gender identity is not explicitly prohibited in the law.

“The authorities must publicly acknowledge the seriousness of discrimination against LGBTI individuals and the need to take concerted action to address it,” said David Diaz-Jogeix.

“That means condemning any homophobic remarks made by politicians or members of the public.”

Organizers had to change the location of the march three days before the event due to the fear of counter-demonstrations. The final route was only agreed on Saturday after police warned of a security risk.

In March last year local councils in Bălţi, the villages of Chetriş and Hiliuţi in Făleşti District and the Anenii Noi District took openly discriminatory measures to forbid any kind of promotion of LGBTI rights. Only one council repealed its decision upon intervention by the Ombudsperson.

On 12 June, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the banning of an LGBTI demonstration in May 2005 in Chisinau had violated the right to freedom of assembly as well as the right not to be discriminated against.

The leaders of some of Russia’s largest nongovernmental organizations raised their concerns about a Kremlin crackdown during a meeting Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Kerry, who was wrapping up a two-day visit, met with the NGO representatives at Spaso House, the Moscow residence of U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, before flying to Rome later in the day, the State Department said.

“We spoke about the prosecution of NGOs,” veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva told reporters as she left Spaso House with fellow veteran activist Lev Ponomaryov.

“He was impressed with our stories,” she said about Kerry, according to Interfax.

She said the meeting did not address  the anti-Kremlin protests associated with Bolotnaya Ploshchad or the Magnitsky Act, which bars Russian officials implicated in human rights violations from traveling to the U.S.

NGOs have come under increasing pressure after the Justice Ministry ordered that hundreds be searched in recent weeks to check their compliance with a November law that requires those that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents.”

Alexeyeva is among the NGO leaders who have refused to register under the law, which she and other critics see as a government attempt to smear the reputation of critical NGOs.

The deputy head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, Tatyana Lokshina, said ahead of the meeting that she wanted to talk with Kerry about an overall crackdown on Russian civil society in the past year.

“The amendments to the legislation infringe fundamental rights,” Lokshina told Interfax.

According to her, more than 250 NGOs have been checked and 30 were told to register as foreign agents or cease their political activity, including independent elections watchdog Golos.

Levada Center, the independent pollster, denied a report in Izvestia this week that said it too had been asked to register as a foreign agent.

The measures have outraged rights activists both in Russia and abroad. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Nils Muiznieks, slammed the ”foreign agents” law and voiced doubts about the need to conduct the searches during talks with Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika last month.

He said at the time yhat he was particularly concerned with the law’s wording, which he said could be interpreted to mean that all human rights activity was political.

In an interview published in Vedomosti on Wednesday, Muiznieks said the checks were paralyzing the work of the whole nonprofit sector. But Russian authorities, he said, were unlikely to react to his complaints.

Kerry’s two-day visit to Moscow is his first to Russia after his appointment as the U.S. secretary of state in February. In addition to the meeting with civil society representatives, Kerry held  wide-ranging talks with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The world’s largest and most expensive Jewish Museum opened to great fanfare in Russia late last year. And although it has only been open for less than six months, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow has become a must-see for any visitors to the Russian capital.

A high profile project, its construction cost around $50 million, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin donated a month’s wages. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in what is now Belarus, flew to Moscow for the museum’s opening in November 2012.

There the 89-year-old Israeli leader told reporters that, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart.”

The history of the Jews in Russia is as complex and emotional as any childhood memories.

This large and engaging museum—which was primarily funded by oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin—is dedicated to the ambivalent history of Jews in Russia, land that has been the site of both immense Jewish achievement and suffering.

“We tried to make our museum not about how bad or how good it was to be a Jew in Russia, but simply about how it was,” said Borukh Gorin, the chairman of the museum, according to the Los Angeles Times.

To tell the tale, the museum has adopted a very modern approach. It employs interactive displays with personal testimony and archival footage in both Russian and English.

New York based designer Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the United States Holocaust Museum, created a museum that the Russian online television channel Dozhd described as a “Jewish Disneyland.”

As befits a major museum, it occupies a vast space—some 5,000 square feet. Across this floor space the museum offers visitors an array of interactive exhibits. Films in 3-D, interactive maps and touch screens all chronicle Jewish life in what was once the Russian Empire.

A visitor can touch a screen at one exhibit and appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a merchant, or a Russian-Jewish intellectual. If you touch a Torah in a virtual synagogue, the cantor’s voice fills the air.

The exhibitions are presented in chronological order. As visitors progress through the museum, they follow in the path of centuries of Russian Jewry, travelling across medieval Europe to the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and then onto Russian cities.

The Jewish presence in Russia grew as a result of Russia, Prussia and Austria’s division of Poland at the end of the 1700s. Along with the Polish territory it gained, the Russian Empire inherited approximately 1 million Jews. Most of the Jewish population was densely concentrated in rural areas in the north and west of the Russian Empire. Later Tsarist decrees forbade Jews from settling outside of a prescribed area, known as the Pale of Settlement.

Individual Jews had to apply for permission to live outside of the Pale (from where we get the expression, “beyond the pale”), applications which were almost always denied. As the Russian Empire expanded, especially south into the area known as New Russia (southern Ukraine), Jews were permitted to settle in this new terrain, which included the city of Odessa. The Ukrainian port soon became the center of flourishing Jewish life, one of the major Jewish centers of the world.

Visitors to the museum can sit down at a café in Odessa and interact with a virtual, dead Jewish writer, a representative member of the city’s intelligentsia.

In addition to conversation with long-dead authors, a visitor can partake in other interactive role-play at the Odessa café. By touching the table, the visitor is posed a question that was all-too pertinent for many Jewish residents of Odessa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do?”

The question is a good one, not merely hypothetical. Odessa was the site of pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905. Visitors can choose from one of four responses:

“A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

As it happens, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a resident of the city on the Black Sea, chose option C. In the midst of the anti-Jewish violence, Jabotinsky created the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group whose purpose was to safeguard Jews from attack in Odessa and throughout the Russian Empire.

Jabotinsky became convinced that the only ways for Jews to be free from the threat of violence was to be armed— “better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” he said—or, better yet, to live in their own country, the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky became a prominent Zionist, changed his name from Vladimir to Ze’ev, and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinksy died in New York in 1940, before his dream of a Jewish homeland was realized, but after the establishment of the Jewish State, his remains were transferred to Israel.

In addition to contributing to the development of Zionism, the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews to the West—the United States, primarily, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany—and to pre-State Palestine. Then in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution granted equal rights to all minority groups in Russia, including Jews, while it also precipitated more anti-Jewish violence.

The museum outlines these periods, as well as the Holocaust. While the Shoah is by no means the primary focus of the museum, exhibitions detail some of the horrors in which over 2.5 million Russian Jews were murdered. Yet while many Russian Jews perished at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators, Russian Jews fighting in the Soviet Army also helped to liberate concentration camps. Once again, Jewish suffering and success are starkly juxtaposed.

The museum chronicles the Jewish contribution to Russia’s war effort during World War II. It houses a copy of a T-34 tank, which was made in a plant run by a Jewish man in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil and served as the Russian army’s primary tank during the war. The museum also honors Russia’s only female Jewish air force pilot, who received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, with a reproduction of the plane she flew during the war.

Exhibitions also address the post-War period, exploring what it meant to be a Soviet Jew. This section of the museum might be of particular interest to the many Russian-speaking Jews who left the former Soviet Union. There are now hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Russian-speaking Jews and their families who live in Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere outside of Russia.

While many Russian Jews desperately fought to leave the Soviet Union, hoping to immigrate to Israel for ideological reasons—part of the refusenik movement—or to the West, the museum also profiles the many and varied contributions of Russian Jews to the development of the Soviet Union in the fields of politics, literature, engineering, mathematics, literature and the arts.

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, perhaps as many as 5 million souls. But anti-Jewish violence and legislation led to mass emigration from Russia—to primarily to the United States, pre-State Israel and Western Europe. Then the Nazi genocide further decimated Jewish communities. After the defeat of the Nazis, Soviet authorities repressed Jewish religious and cultural life, as well as other religions. In the wake of the break down of the Soviet Union, yet more Russian Jews left the country for Israel and the West. These events radically cut the size of Russia’s Jewish population, which currently numbers approximately 200,000.

Although there may be fewer Jews in Russia than at any point in over 200 years, Moscow is now home to an impressive museum—earlier this month, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center received the “Museum of the Year” award from the Russia edition of the prestigious The Art Newspaper, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.

So many of the world’s Jews, from Nobel laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres down, can trace their families’ histories to Russia. It is fitting that this major museum honors the heritage of a huge proportion of the world’s Jews and the inextricably intertwined modern histories of Jewish people and Russian lands.

At the appointed moment, they remove their windbreakers to reveal white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the kikes.” Their jackets carry the name of Svoboda, the ultranationalist Ukrainian political party.

A small riot quickly ensues. Angry protestors rip at the T-shirts, but the Svoboda-labeled men give as good as they get. One of the men beats Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, so savagely that he is rendered barely recognizable.

In the days after this April 6 melee, Svoboda denied that the provocateurs at the rally were their men. Yuriy Syrotiuk, a Svoboda parliamentarian, called the men criminals and complained that police were not responding to an act of incitement, Interfax reported. Some suggested the men were anti-Svoboda activists seeking to tarnish its image.

But denials notwithstanding, the incident has raised anxieties among Ukrainian Jews fearful of rising xenophobia and racially motivated violence they say is inspired by Svoboda, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a penchant for thuggery.

“Svoboda lifted the lid from the sewer of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and it’s spilling out,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.

A U.S. State Department report this month singled out Ukraine, along with Hungary and Greece, as places of “concern” because of growing anti-Semitic parties. But open anti-Semitism is still rare in Ukraine. Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry documented just 15 cases of anti-Semitic violence in 2012. In France, the number was 200.

But the behavior of some Svoboda politicians risks changing that, some Ukrainian Jews worry.

Founded in 2004, Svoboda (“freedom” in Ukrainian) is the latest incarnation of the Social-National Party, a far-right movement ideologically aligned with Nazism. But while the Social-National Party never enjoyed any electoral success, Svoboda garnered more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections, becoming the country’s fourth-largest party.

“Svoboda is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Ukrainian Jewry today,” Ukrainian Jewish Committee President Oleksandr Feldman told JTA. “It has no structure and operates in a political vacuum and turmoil which allow it to run rampant.”

Svoboda’s unstructured nature also makes it difficult to pigeonhole. Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok has praised supporters for being the “worst fear of the Jewish-Russian mafia” and has called Jews “kikes.”

Yet the party also speaks admiringly of Israel, and Tyahnybok has made a point of advertising his meeting last December with Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine. Alexander Aronets, Svoboda’s press secretary, has praised Israel on his Facebook page as ”one of the most nationalistic countries in the world.”

Good relations with Israel may be desirable to Svoboda as a defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, a tactic employed by other European nationalist movements that have made overtures in Israel’s direction.

“They know anti-Semitism is preventing the good relations they seek,” said Moshe Azman, Ukraine’s Chabad-affiliated chief rabbi. “But Svoboda is not a uniform entity and I’m not sure the leaders control the rank and file.”

Feldman, an energetic businessman, lawmaker and founder of the Kyiv Interfaith Forum, says Svoboda has helped erode the shame associated with open expressions of anti-Semitism and other ethnic hatreds. His interfaith forum, which each year brings together hundreds of clerics from five faiths, was marred for the first time this year by a minor assault on a Muslim participant outside the conference.

“Svoboda is very frightening to Ukrainian Jews and other minorities because it is an ultra-Jobbik that evolved quickly,” Feldman said, referring to the anti-Semitic and Iran-friendly Hungarian party that also has enjoyed recent electoral success.

“We had hoped Svoboda would tone it down once it’s in parliament, but the opposite has happened,” said Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Ukrainian researcher with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. “The electoral gains have emboldened Svoboda lawmakers to incorporate thuggery as a modus operandi, a very dangerous development.”

One example came in February, when party member Igor Miroshnichenko shimmied up the towering statue of Vladimir Lenin in the town of Akhtyrka, threw a rope around the communist leader’s head, tied the other end to a truck and brought down the monument.

In December, the same man said Mila Kunis, a Ukrainian-American Jewish actress, was “no Ukrainian, but a kike.” Asked by a newspaper if Miroshnichenko could be prosecuted for making a racial insult, a Justice Ministry official said the word he used — “zhydovka,” a feminized version of kike — was permissible and part of the official vocabulary.

“This was another Svoboda success in poisoning the public sphere,” Likhachev says.

Svoboda officials declined several JTA requests for comment for this story.

In February, Likhachev signed a letter along with several other Jewish Ukrainians asking the Jewish Agency for Israel to cancel plans to hold its board of governors meeting in Kiev in June. The letter, which several Jewish leaders dismissed as overblown, said that poor democratic standards and Svoboda’s ascent made Kiev an ill-suited choice.

“Svoboda are riffraff — nothing comparable to Jobbik, which has its own militia and coherent policy,” said Yaakov Bleich, a Ukrainian chief rabbi.

“Svoboda is troubling as a symptom of the main challenges facing Ukrainian Jewry: the economic recession and political uncertainty,” Bleich said. Still, he added, “because Svoboda is a mob, it’s less predictable than Jobbik. Svoboda’s leaders may be unable to control anti-Semitic displays.”

Despite the disagreements, many Jewish leaders seem to agree that Svoboda’s success owes more to frustration with the establishment than to its anti-Semitic statements. Likhachev pointed specifically to the discontent that emerged in the wake of the Orange Revolution, the protests following the 2004 election that brought former president Viktor Yushchenko to power on a platform of greater government accountability.

Bickering and disunity cost Yushchenko the presidency in 2010. He was succeeded by Viktor Yanukovych, the man whom protestors accused five years earlier of election fraud. That development strengthened Svoboda in two ways, Likhachev says.

“First, it radicalized disgruntled voters,” Likhachev says. “Second, the opposition allies learned they needed to stay united to win. So they are willing to overlook Svoboda’s anti-Semitism — to the detriment of Ukrainian society and its Jewish population.”

The slogans “Heil Hitler,” “Jews out” in German and a swastika were scrawled on the pavement near the HKP 562 labor camp in Vilnius, AFP reported. The graffiti was discovered April 22, two days after Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

“It is especially horrific that these anti-Semitic slogans appeared near two historically sensitive sites for the Jewish nation,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius.

On April 23, the Lithuanian government approved a special program of events to mark the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. The proceedings are scheduled for September.

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: April 13, 2013

Embargoed until 0900 GMT, 11 April 2013

The Ukrainian authorities must  seize the current political opportunity  to stop the high level of torture and other ill treatment being carried out by its police force by creating a genuinely independent, impartial and effective institution to investigate complaints against the police, Amnesty International said in a report published today.

“Beatings and torture continue unabated in the Ukraine in spite of the new Criminal Procedure Code adopted by the government late last year. No concrete steps have been taken to set up an independent police accountability mechanism, allowing the police to get away with shocking levels of  mistreatment of detainees ,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Europe and Central Asia Deputy Programme Director.

In a new report,  Ukraine: Don’t stop halfway: Government must use new Criminal Procedure Code to end torture ,  Amnesty International examines new cases of torture and other ill-treatment and calls on the government to seize the opportunity created by the new Criminal Procedure Code to establish a State Investigation Bureau as an effective deterrent to would-be torturers among the police.

The report brings to light new cases of police torture, highlighting how issues raised in previous reports are continuing in the Ukraine. Out of 114,474 complaints made to prosecutors about police treatment in 2012, only 1,750 were investigated, leading to only 320 prosecution cases being opened against 438 police officers.

The Prosecutor’s office is failing to conduct effective investigations into allegations of torture and other ill-treatment. Prosecutors work with police officers to solve ordinary crimes on a daily basis creating an inherent conflict of interest in asking them to investigate complaints against the police. 

Amnesty International has recommended that a fully resourced independent agency to investigate all allegations of human rights violations by law enforcement officers should be established. 

“Abuse by officials can only be prevented when they know they will be held to account for their actions and risk disciplinary or criminal punishment if they are found to be responsible for torture or other ill treatment,” said Diaz-Jogeix.

The new Criminal Procedure Code, introduced in November 2012, has the potential to curb widespread torture as it reduces the length of time suspects can be detained without charge, rendering them vulnerable to abuse or pressure by police officers. Confessions made to police while in custody outside the court are also no longer admissible in court. 

The Code envisages the creation of a State Investigation Bureau, which, if properly established, has the potential to ensure prompt, effective and impartial investigations into allegations of serious human rights violations committed by police officers.

“The creation of an independent police accountability mechanism would usher in a new era for Ukraine’s criminal justice system: an era in which the rights of detainees are respected and officials are held to account for unlawful actions,” said Diaz-Jogeix.

“This creates – in equal measure – an opportunity and a challenge for the Ukrainian people. They need to understand how the proposed new Code protects their rights and they need to have the courage to stand up and demand those rights.”
  
Cases
Vitaliy Levchenko and Andrei Melnichenko had been working on a construction site in the southern city of Ladyzhyn without pay for three months. On 20 November 2012 they went to demand their pay from the manager. Security guards called the police who allegedly started beating the workers with batons and later took them to the police stations in handcuffs where the beating and other ill-treatment continued. Andrei’s eardrum was perforated and both of Vitaliy’s arms were broken. Both suffered multiple bruises. They filed a complaint against the police but in February 2013 the case was closed, based on a police explanation that Vitaliy broke his arms banging on a door and Andrei had fallen over. 

On 16 October 2012 Olexander Popov was snatched from the street and pushed into a car by men who told him they were police. They handcuffed him, put a plastic bag over his head and drove him to a forest. There they electrocuted him for several hours, using different voltages, intermittently through his feet and little fingers. After several hours of torture Olexander was taken to Mariupol City police station where detectives interviewed him about the murder of a person they called ‘Akhman’ whom he did not know.  After his release doctors identified and documented bruises caused by at least 12 different blows with a blunt object. Olexander submitted a complaint to the Mariupol Prosecutor’s office accusing the Mariupol police of torture. In March 2013 the investigating prosecutor closed the case on the basis that the police officers’ testimony contradicted the testimony of Olexander. 

On 18 April 2012 Artem Geraymovych-Megalyas was detained in Simferopol, Crimea, for failing to answer a court summons relating to a stolen drill and two mobile phones. In Zheleznodorozhnyi District police station police officers beat him, demanding that he confess to a range of crimes. Artem says one officer tore his nose with a metal hook. Artem lost consciousness and woke up in hospital a week later. The police claimed that a mentally-ill detainee had attacked Artem with a metal pipe and initiated a criminal case against him. Artem remained in hospital until June while medics treated several injuries to his brain, fractures to his skull, and attempted to repair his face. On 1 November he submitted a complaint to the Prosecutor’s office accusing the police of torture. The Prosecutor’s office rejected the complaint for lack of ‘evidence of a crime’. Artem is permanently disfigured and suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress. He is currently in hospital and unable to speak properly. He says that he would be able to identify the police he says tortured him, but has not been given the opportunity to do so. 

See also
No evidence of a Crime: paying the price for police impunity in Ukraine

Public Document 
**************************************** 
For more information please call Amnesty International’s press office in London, UK, on 
+44 20 7413 5566 
email:  press@amnesty.org  twitter: @amnestypress

April 15, 2013

U R G E N T

Honorable Senator Benjamin Cardin
Honorable Congressman Christopher Smith
Co-chairs of the Helsinki Commission of the American Congress (Committee on Foreign Affairs)

Dear co-chairs of the Helsinki Commission:

Alarming information about the escalation of wide attacks on the Russian NGOs comes every day from Moscow. Almost all powerful inspection departments on the federal and local levels (like Security Service, Prosecutors’ offices, divisions of the Interior Ministry, even Fire Departments, Taxes, Customs, Border Troops, etc.) have been thrown on central Russian and International NGOs (like “Memorial,” Moscow Helsinki Group, Human Rights Movement, “Golos,” Committee Against Tortures, – about 700 according to President Putin) in spite of recent planned examinations. We know of 222 groups across Russia that have been raided. They include religious organizations as well as pro-democracy and human right groups. The religious groups include Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is a concerted effort by the Putin government to destroy all such groups by applying the iron hand of the state. Raiders even came to the private apartments of the chairs of important NGOs, like Committee Against Tortures. The explanation was delivered by President Putin, – how the new law about “foreign agents” was to be implemented. In an interview to the German mass-media on April 4, 2013, he said that Russian NGOs received about 1 billion dollars during the last 4 months for “their political activity inside the country.” At the same time these NGOs “violated” the new law – they did not recognize themselves as “foreign agents.”

Everybody knows this government is deathly afraid of free expression and the possibility of true democracy and accountability for violations of human rights. Anti-American rhetoric has become part of the official foreign policy. The economic situation is very poor in Russia but its finances are investing in military equipment. Russian diplomats reject almost all Western initiatives for settling peace and stability. Persecution of the honest NGOs will inhibit the development of public society in Russia and deprive the world of truthful information. The purpose of the raids is to spread fear again all over the society. We are witnesses to the micro-Stalinization of all spheres of freedom, culture, and science. We also see the first attempts to undermine the Helsinki Final Act. The key is to help Russian NGOs to survive and to continue to operate. We need to stop their suffocation by the Putin regime.

The UCSJ has been working in the former Soviet Union since 1970 and up until 1991 was the voice of the Refuseniks. UCSJ consistently advocated for freedom of emigration throughout this time. For the last 20 years, we have been the voice of democratic forces and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, working as the bridge between Russian and Western public societies.

We hope that your distinguished Commission can inspire the American public and authorities to help Russian (as well as other parts of the FSU) NGOs to continue their important work. In addition, we hope you will influence the American administration to support NGO protection. As the first organizational measures we propose:

• to establish a Crisis Support Group (CSG) in Washington D.C. to coordinate efforts to support the integrity of Russian NGOs and their leadership. We are ready to open our offices in Washington DC to aid in this effort;
• to run special hearings about the Russian fulfillment of the Helsinki Human Rights Documents
• (American Congress, autumn, 2013) with the participation of several Russian NGOs leaders;
• to ask the State Department to include in the Magnitsky List the names of officials who persecute
• NGOs in the present crisis;
• to inform the European Union members about American measures and invite them to join it.

Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,

Larry Lerner

President

The Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organization, on Thursday became the latest NGO inspected in a massive government campaign that has hit hundreds of non-state groups in 25 regions and is unprecedented in post-Soviet Russia, a rights leader said.

Prosecutors and Justice Ministry officials on Thursday showed up at the headquarters of the Moscow Helsinki Group, where they asked the organization’s veteran leader, 85-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva, to turn over internal documents.

“They’ve inspected everybody else, and now they’ve come to us,” she told Interfax.

One has to go back to the Great Terror of 1937-38, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin closed all foreign organizations, to find a historical analogy to the current situation, presidential human rights councilman Sergei Krivenko said at a news conference on Thursday.

Leading Russian and foreign NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, and Transparency International and Memorial have been among those inspected, raising fears of a crackdown. Officials have accused some NGOs that criticize the government of being foreign-backed puppets.

President Vladimir Putin said the searches would check whether NGOs were following the law and, in an apparent nod to critics’ concerns, asked human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin to keep the process under control. “We wouldn’t want any excesses,” he said, Interfax reported.

The month-old operation has also attracted international condemnation and threatened to strain relations with Germany, France and the United States, some of whose NGOs have been searched.

“Damage to German-Russian relations has already been done. Germany was very irritated by the inspections at two German NGOs,” said Jens Siegert, head of the Moscow office of the Boell foundation, a German NGO for civil society development.

Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to discuss the issue with Putin next month during his visit to the Hannover Messe industrial fair, said Ruprecht Polenz, foreign affairs committee head in Germany’s lower house of parliament, Die Welt reported.

The U.S. and French governments have both asked for an explanation for the searches.

A senior Russian diplomat said the checks were legal and rejected international criticism.

“Unfortunately, this criticism is completely unfounded. We haven’t heard any serious arguments from our colleagues,” said Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, Interfax reported Thursday.

A wide array of NGOs, from women’s rights groups to environmental advocates to Roman Catholic parishes, have seen their premises searched by various agencies since the beginning of the month.

The inspections are “artillery preparation” before the government moves to enforce a controversial law that requires certain NGOs that receive foreign financing to register as “foreign agents,” said Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights group and a presidential human rights councilman.

NGOs have boycotted, and not a single one has registered under the foreign agents law, which went into effect in November, Chikov told journalists in response to a question from The Moscow Times.

Memorial, for instance, will not refuse “prestigious” foreign grants in the future, Krivenko said. “Our parents taught us not to lie, and so we refuse to call ourselves ‘foreign agents,’” he said.

Russian NGOs received about 19 billion rubles ($613 million) in foreign funds in 2011, Chikov said.

The Prosecutor General’s Office, which has been tight-lipped about the searches, offered vague clues as to government’s objectives on Thursday, saying in a statement that the operation would allow officials to establish “positive and negative tendencies” and analyze current NGO laws.

Inspectors have reportedly searched for signs of illegal “extremism” and financing with particular zeal, and the prosecutors’ statement referred to ultranational and radical religious groups operating under different names. It did not mention foreign agents, whose outing is the goal of the searches, the Justice Ministry said Monday.

But if inspectors were after extremism, “Why are they often joined by tax, fire and other inspectors?” said Mikhail Fedotov, head of the presidential human rights council.

One group received a citation because it did not have a plan for fighting rats, “a serious oversight, of course, but it has nothing to do with extremism, unless you’re suggesting that the rats are being used to deliver biological weapons,” Fedotov said.

Prosecutors have not yet responded to a written request for additional clarification from the human rights council as required to do so by presidential writ, Chikov said, adding that the council hoped to receive a reply by late April, when he said the checks were scheduled to wrap up.