Meeting in Cherkessk with Ebzeyev and other republican leaders on April 21, Khloponin stressed the need to galvanize the republic's economy and reduce unemployment. In a tacit acknowledgement of the animosity between the majority Karachais and the Cherkess (who account for just 11 percent of the total population), Khloponin gave Ebzeyev until May 1 to name a Cherkess prime minister. Shortly after his appointment as president in September 2008, Ebzeyev had named a Greek, Vladimir Kayshev, to head the new cabinet.
Ebzeyev yesterday duly named Deputy Prime Minister Muradin Kemov, a Cherkess, as acting prime minister. Ebzeyev said there would be no sweeping changes in the new cabinet and assessed the performance of the outgoing government as ...
The Washington-based non-governmental organization Freedom House released its annual report on global press freedom on Thursday, complete with a particularly scathing analysis of the situation in Russia. Out of 196 countries, Russia took 175th place on a ranking of global press freedom, just beating out Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and China, and trailing slightly behind Congo and Yemen. Out of the report’s three basic categories – free, partially free, and not free – Russia was declared to be decidedly "not free.”
The Freedom House report maintains that press freedom declined in 2009 all over the world, including in Western Europe. That said, "Russia remained among the world’s more repressive and most dangerous media environments,” and figures among countries where the political opposition, non-governmental organizations, and independent media outlets come under the greatest deal of censorship and pressure.
Vienna, April 27 – The murder of Moscow Judge Eduard Chuvashov two weeks ago is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger problem, a St. Petersburg scholar says, one that threatens not only the lives of judges and their families but even the possibility of justice in the Russian Federation. That is because, Denis Primakov, a researcher at the Institute of Problems of Law at the European University in the northern capital, says, judges routinely give out "soft” or suspended sentences because they cannot count on the legal system to protect them from angry criminals if they do otherwise (www.pravo.ru/review/view/29075/). And that in turn, he continues, only adds to public cynicism about the judicial system, making the introduction of a law-based state that much more difficult. ...
Back in February, the Russian weekly New Times published a story about an elite detachment of the Russian Interior Ministry’s OMON security forces that allegedly forces migrant workers to work without pay, effectively as slaves. The ministry was incensed and denied the accusations, blaming the paper for shoddy journalism. The paper stood by the article, which was based on the testimony by a former OMON officer from the detachment in question.
On April 5, the Tverskoy Court in Moscow sanctioned a search and seizure of the New Times editorial office in connection with police accusations of libel. The police attempted to carry out the seizure this past Wednesday, but Editor-in-Chief Yevgeniya Albats refused to hand over any documents, maintaining that the seizure is illegal while the newspaper awaits a hearing to contest the decision in the Moscow City Court.
Vienna, April 14 – Just as the Soviet authorities "criminalized” any systemic criticism, so too the post-Soviet Russian powers that be are moving in the same direction through laws and decrees that "criminalize” extremism without defining the limits of that all too elastic term, according to a Russian human rights expert. In a presentation at the Sakharov Center yesterday, Yevgeny Ikhlov, the secretary of the Experts Council "For Human Rights,” traced the way in which Soviet leaders limited freedom of speech by criminalizing criticism of various kinds and argued that the post-Soviet Russian leaders have been following the same path (forum-msk.org/material/politic/2909658.html). Although the Soviet leadership harshly punished its ideological opponents from the beginning, Ikhlov said, it "criminalized” any systemic criticism only in the 1960s as a way of providing "a legal foundation” for totalitarianism in the ...
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