RIGHTS: EU Glosses over Violations in Russia

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Nov 29 2006 (IPS) - Finnish human rights groups say that European Union leaders failed to raise human violations in Russia effectively enough at their meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin here last week.

“We are quite disappointed, we had hoped that human rights violations should have featured prominently at the summit,” Jukka Mallinen, president of the Finnish branch of PEN, an international association of writers campaigning for freedom of expression around the world, told IPS.

Putin was meeting European leaders in the Finnish capital in a European Union-Russia summit Friday. Finland currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Human rights organisations held a series of public events ahead of Putin’s visit to bring attention to human rights violations in the Russian Federation. The Finnish branch of Amnesty International published their findings on torture in Russia a day before Putin’s visit. Activists held a candlelight protest as Putin conferred with the EU leaders.

On his last visit to Finland Oct. 20, radio stations played a song produced by Finnish artists in honour of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered in Moscow Oct. 7. She had long campaigned to draw attention to human rights violations in Chechnya.

The EU did raise concerns over human rights abuses in Chechnya and also asked Putin about progress on investigations into the murder of Politkovskaya, EU officials said. But the campaigners say the issue was not raised forcefully enough to match the level of violations.

“The concerns were raised as a mere ritual which Putin didn’t need to be excited about,” said Mallinen.

“The discussion was superficial, and we had hoped that more had been done to put human rights prominently on the agenda,” said Frank Johansson, executive director of the Finnish branch of Amnesty International.

“We had put out fairly concrete proposals to Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen to raise with Putin, but these were ignored,” Johansson told IPS.

Vanhanen had been pressed to seek guarantees that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists, judges and lawyers be allowed freedom in their work without harassment, Johansson said.

They also wanted Putin to allow the UN special rapporteur on torture to visit Russia, a visit that was cancelled earlier at short notice because the Russian authorities did not agree to the terms of reference, Johansson said.

NGOs activities are heavily restricted in Russia, he said. A new law on NGO activities has placed onerous demands on organisations, forcing them to spend considerable time filing numerous reports with little time left for their core activities.

“Officials have very strict controls on what organisations are doing; they have to report on all kinds of events they plan carrying on within the next year and who are attending,” said Johansson.

Putin dismissed accusations of human rights violations as politically motivated propaganda. And he reminded leaders of killings in EU countries.

“If we look at what is happening in certain EU member countries within the mafia circles there, judges, prosecutors, investigators, journalists and police officers are murdered. Such mafioso has operated for decades in European countries,” Putin told the press here.

But European leaders did not take up the human rights issue strongly because of lack of collective political will, according to Johansson. Mallinen said Putin had played a divide- and-rule game, and so European leaders were unable to speak with one voice on human rights violations in Russia.

Russia is sitting on massive energy resources that the EU depends on. Some analysts say this dependence is a constraint on the leverage that the EU has with Russia.

The Amnesty report “Russian Federation: Torture and Forced ‘Confessions'”, compiled by Amnesty researchers with the help of Russian human rights organisations, documents instances of torture within the past year.

“Beatings with fists, plastic bottles filled with water, books, truncheons and poles; special rooms fitted with metal tables with wrist and leg restraints used for rape; suffocation and electric shock to different parts of the body are some of the means of torture used by the police in order to extract confessions from detainees,” says the report.

“The easiest way to promotion for police officers is to ‘solve’ as many crimes as possible – and too often, the approach to solving a crime is to extract a ‘confession’,” the Amnesty report says.

In 2005, NGOs documented, with medical evidence, more than 100 cases of torture in 11 of Russia’s 89 regions – and these do not include the North Caucasus where Russia is at war with separatist Chechen rebels, Amnesty says.

“Russia does not fully cooperate with international mechanisms to prevent torture,” says the Amnesty report.

Russia has ratified the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). However, according to Amnesty, it has denied immediate access to detention sites in the Chechen Republic, and does not regularly authorise publication of the CPT report.

“Amnesty is particularly concerned about the practice of torture of individuals held incommunicado in unofficial and unacknowledged places of detention in Russia’s North Caucasus region,” the group said in its report.

“Investigations leading to prosecutions of such allegations of torture are almost non- existent, which has created a climate of impunity in the region.”

The situation around Chechnya is being described as stable, “but the stability there is similar to the one in a cemetery,” journalist Grigory Mikhailovic Pasko told IPS. Pasko was visiting Finland at the invitation of PEN to attend a symposium on human rights.

“Imprisonment or even murder of journalists has become a routine affair in Russia,” said Pasko. He was jailed in 1993 on charges of espionage, for filming and reporting Russia’s illegal dumping of radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan.

The meeting was called to agree a new EU partnership with Russia, but talks could not proceed because Poland exercised a veto in protest against a Russian ban on Polish meat exports.