Human Rights Continue to Suffer under Russia

Russia’s war with Ukraine has reminded the free world of the reality of Moscow’s continuing abhorrent record of human rights violations. Except for a brief lull during the transition from a communist Russia to a federal Russia under the late President Boris Yeltsin, the world’s media has not been exposed to such a steady stream of news about the Kremlin tightening the screws around the Russian people, media and civil society – the backbone of a democratic country.

The denial of human rights has reached such an abysmal level that even longtime apologist for Soviet human rights violations, Vladimir Pozner, has finally admitted that the media in Russia is no longer independent.

Human rights activists and oppositionists such a Boris Nemtsov and Valeriya Novodvorskaya have been eliminated without any attempt to conceal the officially sanctioned crimes. Those who remain alive are hounded by the secret police, regular cops and thugs from the Caucasus.

Last week, Russia’s lower house of parliament gave final approval to a bill about what constitutes an “undesirable organization.” Supporters of the work of NGOs – nongovernmental organizations – say this legislation will be a new blow to a nongovernmental community that already has been facing considerable pressure since Vladimir Putin solidified his control over Russia. This civil crime should be the top action item on the agenda of every NGO associated with UN agencies, programs or departments.

The heavily pro-Kremlin State Duma overwhelmingly approved the legislation, which would give Russian prosecutors the right to list as undesirable foreign organizations “posing a threat to Russia’s defense capabilities, security, public order, [or] public health” – a catchall category which will allow Putin to outlaw any NGO he deems critical of his internal and external policies including Russia’s war with Ukraine. It must now be approved by the upper house in what practice suggests will be little more than a formality, and then sent to Putin, who will surely sign it into law.

Under the bill, which even the Kremlin’s own human rights ombudsman has opposed, individuals who work for such organizations inside Russia could be slapped with hefty fines or handed prison sentences of up to six years.

Human rights watchdogs – such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – have condemned the legislation.

Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the bill will have a widespread impact. “This law may very seriously complicate our work in Russia,” she told Voice of America’s Russian Service.

“It is targeted against Russian partners, Russian civil society activists and organizations, Russian citizens. The authorities don’t need to provide any special justifications to blacklist anybody – they don’t need any legal crutches. This law is an assault on Russian citizens and civil society and the intent of the authorities is to deprive the civil society of the breathing space to put it into a vacuum, cut it from international networks and partners.”

Sergei Nikitin, Amnesty International’s Moscow director, told the US broadcaster that the law will make it difficult for Russians to have contacts with foreigners on human rights matters, which harkens back to the days of USSR, when meetings between reporters and dissidents landed both in prison.

“The foreign organizations are easy to close,” he observed. “But if it’s done, any contact of the Russian human rights activist or Russian NGO with the ‘undesirable organization,’ which headquarters are outside of Russia, would be considered a violation of this law, which, in our view, is very dangerous.”

Already in 2012, Russia had passed legislation that grants broad leeway for authorities to define nongovernmental groups that receive foreign funding as “foreign agents” and being such means being a spy.

According to Interfax, Russian offices of international human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, said they will not adjust their activity under the Russian law on unwelcome organizations. “It is not planned to change the work of the Amnesty International office in Russia in the context of the new law,” Nikitin was quoted as saying.

Human Rights Watch observed on its website: “In 2012 Russia’s parliament adopted a law that required nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to register as ‘foreign agents’ with the Ministry of Justice if they engage in ‘political activity’ and receive foreign funding. The definition of ‘political activity’ under the law is so broad and vague that it can extend to all aspects of advocacy and human rights work.

“Initially, the law required all respective NGOs to request the Ministry to have them registered and implied legal consequences for failure to do so. Because in Russia ‘foreign agent’ can be interpreted only as ‘spy’ or ‘traitor,’ there is little doubt that the law aims to demonize and marginalize independent advocacy groups. Russia’s vibrant human rights groups resolutely boycotted the law, calling it ‘unjust’ and ‘slanderous.’”

Moscow’s onslaught against the last vestiges of democracy in Russia also targets Twitter, Facebook and Google for apparently fostering subversion. In a letter to executives on Monday, May 20, the director of the Russian communications oversight agency warned that the three US companies could face sanctions if they continued alleged illegal activities in Russia, Izvestia newspaper reported last week.

The agency’s deputy director, Maksim Ksenzov, had issued a warning to the three companies on May 6, telling them they were in violation of the bloggers law because they had not provided requested data on the number of daily visitors to several users’ pages, as well as information allowing the authorities to identify the owners of accounts with more than 3,000 daily visitors.

If the companies do not take steps to delete from their sites “information containing calls to participate in mass rioting, extremist activities” or unsanctioned public events, the watchdog would “limit access to the information resource where that information is posted,” Ksenzov warned.

Since the start of Putin’s third term in 2012, the Kremlin has launched a crackdown on the Internet in Russia, passing laws that give state supervisory bodies wide-ranging powers to regulate and block websites thereby stifling freedom of expression.

Russia’s war against human rights also entered Ukraine on the bayonets of its invading armies. A law was recently implemented in the Russian occupied eastern Ukrainian oblast, called the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) that allows prosecution against journalists for “abusing their rights” or for doing jobs that are protected and commonplace in a democratic society.

In occupied Crimea, the first Ukrainian region to be invaded and seized by Russia, a range of Ukrainian and Crimean cultural expressions are now banned.

“A flash mob to mark Ukrainian Embroidery Day in Russian-occupied Crimea on Thursday (May 21) resulted in four Ukrainian activists and three TV Inter journalists being detained, interrogated for five hours and having their fingerprints taken.  When asked why the fingerprints were needed, the officers replied that this is in case ‘something happens to you tomorrow.  Headless bodies get found here,’ wrote Halya Coynash on the website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

“With three Ukrainian activists and a number of young Crimean men still missing after being abducted and / or disappearing without trace since Russia annexed Crimea, the threat contained in the words was clear.  Leonid Kuzmin and other activists from the newly created Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Crimea have heard similarly menacing remarks before.  They have also experienced similar forms of harassment, with each heavy-handed measure by the police more absurd than the last.”

In Crimea, human rights abuses extend to all religious denominations, expect the Russian Orthodox Church. A recent article in Foreign Affairs revealed: “Once Russia took military control, it ordered all of Crimea’s 1,500 religious groups to register with Moscow in order to gain Russian legal operating status. Russian officials are permitted to make lengthy requests for comprehensive information, so the registration process can be onerous and costly. And the stakes for registration are high: Unregistered groups lack the status to open bank accounts, own property, issue invitations to foreign guests, and publish literature.

“Moscow is applying all of its restrictive laws in Crimea, including its anti-extremism law, which defines extremism as merely asserting the superiority of one’s religious beliefs and does not require the threat or use of violence for prosecution. This law, which USCIRF, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, and other organizations have repeatedly called on Moscow to reform, remains a major threat to religious freedom in Russia. And now it has come to Crimea, and Kremlin-installed local authorities are using it to persecute religious minorities.”

The writers concluded: “What is happening in Crimea today bodes ill for eastern Ukraine. In the Donbas region, which Russian-backed separatists already control, a 4,000-man group known as the Russian Orthodox Army, which was headed by a former Russian military intelligence officer, reportedly has been attacking Protestant and Kyiv Patriarchate communities and confiscating their property.

“There is no question that Russia bears the responsibility. It instituted discriminatory laws at home, and those spread to Crimea. The question is what can be done about the problem. Certainly the international community should continue to demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine. It also must renew its calls on Moscow to reform its anti-extremism law, and to stop using it to harass religious minorities and the Moscow Patriarchate’s Orthodox rivals.”

Human rights abuses also extend to the battlefield of eastern Ukraine. Amnesty International reported last week that Russian terrorists and Ukrainian forces torture their prisoners. Amnesty said in a statement that it has heard from former captives of both Ukrainian government and Russian mercenaries who said they faced savage beatings, torture with electric shocks, kicking and stabbings – with specifying which group committed which crimes.

“The situation on the separatist side is particularly chaotic, with a variety of different groups holding captives in at least a dozen known locations,” Amnesty said.

Fortunately, Ukrainian officials did not turn a deaf ear to this accusations. Markiian Lubkivskyi, adviser to the Head of the Security Service posted on his Facebook that Security Service Head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko has met to discuss this situation with Tetiana Mazur, executive director of Amnesty International Ukraine. According to Lubkivskyi, Nalyvaichenko said the Security Service is ready to provide AI with all the information it has on crimes against humanity, human rights violation, on tortures and humiliations in particular, in the occupied Crimea and in the temporarily occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions by the fighters and Russian citizens, especially the servicemen of the Russian army.
Furthermore, Lubkivskyi wrote, the Security Service together with the military prosecutor’s office are ready to properly investigate each of the human rights abuse cases mentioned in the AI report in order to find out all the facts and establish the truth. For that purpose Nalyvaichenko asked T. Masur to give his office the statements on the abuse cases that were found so that they could perform a thorough investigation.

Russia has again called the world’s attention to its human rights violations in the region for the former captive nations. However you analyze current events in the post-USSR sphere, the threats against innocent and peaceful populations are result of Russia’s imperial, belligerent and criminal behavior.

Armine Sahakyan, a human rights activist based in Armenia, observed in the Kyiv Post: “None of the human-rights abuses in Crimea could have happened without Russian military involvement. And there would have been far fewer abuses in eastern Ukraine if Russian troops had not intervened there. The array of abuses in the two areas has been mind-boggling — summary executions, repression of opposition figures, journalists and minorities, confiscation of property, and on and on.

“Russia’s neighbors would agree that some Russian exports are worthwhile — vodka, for example. Those neighbors would be much better off without Moscow exporting its human-rights abuses, however.”

The free world – its officialdom and civic activists – suffer from a short attention span syndrome in general and specifically with regards to human rights abuses in and by Russia. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi highlighted Moscow’s blatant human rights abuses of its LGBT population. But, unfortunately, the outcry faded quickly, and nothing has improved for the LGBT community in the country. Instead, the international community’s reactions have switched from indignation to resignation both inside and outside the country while the crackdown against LGBT groups in Russia continues.

Perhaps not since President Jimmy Carter, who in his inaugural address, declared “The world itself is now dominated by a new spirit. Peoples more numerous and more politically aware are craving, and now demanding, their place in the sun--not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic human rights.” – has the global community had such a clear challenge and opportunity to stand up for the oppressed.

With journalists, faithful, soldiers and civilians, and nongovernmental organizations facing daily threats against their existence by draconian laws sanctioned by an oligarch with his finger on the nuclear trigger, free peoples around the world have an opportunity to oppose those violations and encourage Russians to arise in defense of their rights. If the free world misses this chance again, it must then prepare to defend its democracy against a foreign invader on its territory. Human rights are too precious to be left to the whims of an academic discussion, a political speech, a religious pulpit or a global rostrum. History shows that indignation is volatile for short term while the violations are long term and the struggle painful. For human rights to have a practical and beneficial meaning, people – civil society – the backbone of every democracy must stand up and defend them and oppose the perpetrator.