Authorities in Russia's Chechnya region have committed torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and other “very serious” human rights violations and abuses, an expert report has concluded.
The fact-finding report on human rights violations and abuses in Chechnya, presented at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on December 20, said the victims included members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, human right defenders, lawyers, independent media, and civil society organizations.
It found a worsening “climate of intimidation” against journalists and civil society activists and a “climate of impunity,” which it said is “detrimental to any accountability for human rights violations.”
The report also noted that the Russian authorities responsible for investigating crimes in Chechnya “appear not to have lived up to their responsibilities” in addressing the “grave situation” in the region. Read more via RFE/RL
Included in the report:
Annex – Response by the Russian Mission at OSCE to request by rapporteur for support
Dear Professor Benedek,
As underlined in our letter of 9 November 2018 in response to 16 OSCE participating States, which had invoked the OSCE Moscow Mechanism “to look into alleged human rights violations” in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, the Russian side is convinced that the concerns and accusations with regard to the mentioned situation are biased and groundless. Moreover, they clearly demonstrate the policy of “double standards” in the use of the OSCE human dimension mechanisms that can only increase degradation of the OSCE.
We would like to recall that in order to full fill our commitments in good faith, the Russian side responded promptly and constructively to previous concerns of the invokers under the Vienna Mechanism. As you may know, this, on our initiative, was followed by the subsequent discussion on 7 September with the heads of missions of interested participating States. Furthermore, with the bona fide aim to look into the concerns raised before us, we requested the States involved to provide us in writing with well-documented and credible detailed information regarding names of those 27 individuals, who had been allegedly “extrajudicially executed by the Chechen authorities in Grozny in January 2017”. We asked also to give us dates and circumstances of their detentions and/or disappearances. However, our legitimate and repeated request remains unaddressed.