From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/26/2006 11:20 PM

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NGOs Urge G8 Focus on Human Rights Situation in Russia
26.06.2006

MosNews

Ahead of Russia’s hosting of the Group of Eight (G8) summit next month, a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is touring European capitals to draw attention to what it says is a deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, CNSNews.com daily reports.

Rights advocates said they hoped their concerns would be taken up when the heads of state of the leading industrialized nations — the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan — are hosted by the Russian government in St. Petersburg from July 15-17.

A recent report by groups including the World Organization Against Torture has documented a sharp crackdown on human rights organizations in Russia.

“This year is a special one for Russia in terms of its international status,” said Tanya Lokshina, director of DEMOS Center for Information and Research in Moscow. Russia holds the rotating presidencies of both the (G8) and the Council of Europe. This should mean that the Russian government operates on democratic principles, she said, but “unfortunately, this is far from the truth.”

“All the democratic institutions and all the bases of a democratic society are right now being destroyed in Russia — if they have not already been destroyed.”

President Vladimir Putin signed into law this year legislation placing stringent controls on NGOs in Russia and allowing the government to shut down any groups that violate mandatory requirements to file detailed accounts of meetings, members and even online activity.

Lokshina said Russia no longer had a free press, independent political parties or an independent judicial system. The last remaining independent bodies in the country were the NGOs, which were now under threat. She predicted that the government would wait till after the G8 Summit before shutting down NGOs, in order not to attract further negative international attention.

Human rights organizations accuse Russian forces in Chechnya  of carrying out kidnappings, executions and torture in place of using the political process for hearing grievances. NGOs operating there have been unable to get an exact count of the number of victims who have disappeared without a trace.

Oussam Baissaev, an official from the human rights group Memorial, operating in some of the Chechnya-Ingushetia region, said the organization had received 3,000 letters from relatives of people who had disappeared in the last six years. But Moscow had recently admitted to the UN’s top human rights official, Louise Arbour, that there had been around 7,000 disappearances. Exact numbers were hard to obtain because people were wary and even relatives were afraid to report disappearances, he said.

Another situation that has attracted the attention of human rights organizations is an escalation of racism and xenophobia  in Russia. A Russian NGO called the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis said that in the first five months of 2006, 137 racist attacks had been recorded, including 21 murders, most of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

SOVA director Alexander Verkhovskiy reported an increase in nationalistic propaganda. While the government had officially denounced racist acts, its reactions were often inappropriate and appeared opportunistic. In one case, for instance, it shut down two newspapers, using as a pretext Muslim unhappiness about the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed. But one of the newspapers had not even published the sketches, while the other only did so in part.

“When you will hear talk about the anti-racial hatred or anti-fascist campaigns of the Russian government, it will be important to separate what it really is doing to fight against it and how it is using it as a pretext to pursue other goals that are very different,” Verkhovskiy said.

Memorial head Oleg Orlov said European officials’ pledges to hold behind-the-scenes discussions on human rights with the Russian government had not borne fruit in the past. It was time for a more public approach.

The rights campaigners said they hoped the G8 heads of state would find a way to send a clear message to Putin that they were concerned about the situation in Russia.

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/06/26/ngosurgemorerights4humaninrussia.shtml