Police Dissolve Tea Party of Russian and German HR Campaigners
posted by zaina19 on February, 2007 as Human Rights
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 2/7/2007 3:36 AM Photo — MosNews archive Photo — MosNews archive Police Dissolve Tea Party of Russian and German HR Campaigners
06.02.07
MosNews Russian police have imposed fines on a group of Russian Human Rights activists for organizing a tea party with German colleagues who were monitoring the situation of ethnic minorities in South Russian region of Kuban. Russian Novye Izvestiya daily reported that the Human Rights Committee of the South Russian city of Novorossiysk was holding a meeting with Human Rights activists and students from Germany on January 23, 2006. The meeting was held in a fine arts school where the German guests visited an exhibition of children’s works calling for tolerance. When the visitors started to drink tea, a group of policemen accompanied with an interpreter and a cameraman of the local TV channel broke into the school and checked the documents of everyone present. Upon completing this (the German HR campaigners had their documents in order), policemen said that the tea party was not sanctioned by the authorities and must be treated like a non-sanctioned rally. German citizens involved in the scandal called the German embassy in Moscow and decided to leave Russia immediately despite of the fact that the planned to stay for one week. A representative of the Novorossiysk Human Rights Committee said that the law enforcers paid the attention to the tea party because the organization was protecting Meskheti Turks — a local ethnic minority. Local directorate of the Interior Ministry played down the scandal saying that the document check was an ordinary event and the two foreigners who were asked to present their papers looked suspicious. A few days later, a local magistrate found the HR activists guilty of holding a meeting without notifying the administration and imposed small fines on all participants of the meeting and on the school director. The Novorossiysk Human Rights Committee plans to appeal the decision in the higher instance court.
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