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HR news |
To the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles
Dear Mr Gil-Robles
In response to your request, we are writing to you with details of our working contacts with organs of the procurator's office.
We are also happy to continue sending you information on the human rights situation in the Chechen Republic.
Our work with the procurator's office consisted for a long time only of an extended and poorly informed exchange of letters. Substantive answers to questions were only received after several months.
Our first more productive contact took place only following the seminar in Strasbourg (26 to 27 November 2001).
At the start of December we learned that a "clean-up" operation had taken place in the village of Avtura (1 to 3 December) without a procurator being present and that those arrested had disappeared. On 6 December 2001, Human Rights Centre "Memorial" sent a fax to the Procurator of the Chechen Republic, V.G. Chernovy, inquiring about the arbitrary actions and lawlessness which occurred during the "clean-up" of the village of Avtury. A telephone conversation also took place between the Executive Director of HRC "Memorial" T.I. Kasatkina and V.G. Chernovy.
On 10 December 2001, T.I. Kasatkina met with the Procurator of the Chechen Republic in the city of Grozny. During the meeting, it emerged that information from Human Rights Centre "Memorial" had been quickly verified by organs of the procurator's office and on the basis of this verification, a criminal investigation had been started. All the inhabitants of the village of Avtura who had been detained were set free. Of these, 18 people had been detained during the "clean-up" from 1 to 3 December and two others had been detained earlier.
However, we must emphasise that this is only a single and isolated instance. There is no actual systematic cooperation between the procurator's office and Human Rights Centre "Memorial" to speak of at the moment. The future will tell whether the procurator's office is ready to cooperate in this manner.
Moreover, Human Rights Centre "Memorial" would like to draw your attention to the fact that the armed forces, and in particular the Interior Ministry, are continuing to breach Russian laws in the most vile manner. Those inhabitants of the village of Avtura who had been illegally arrested were held on the territory of a division of the interior troops of the Russian Federation Interior Ministry (apparently one of the divisions making up the operational group DON-100) near the village of Regita.
We have no information as to whether those who are guilty of this most base abuse of human rights have been punished. Criminal proceedings have been started but so far no-one has been held criminally responsible. Unless the guilty are punished, stopping human rights breaches in Chechnya is a hopeless task.
We have sent further inquiries to the procurator for the Chechen Republic, in particular in relation to several people who have been arrested by federal forces and have then disappeared. We are waiting for a response from him. We will only be able to judge the extent to which the procurator's office is prepared actually to protect people's rights on the basis of concrete facts.
We would draw your attention to the fact that the number of members of federal forces being brought to justice and punished by the courts is disproportionately low compared to the number of crimes which have been committed.
Dear Mr Gil-Robles
In March of last year we met with you in Moscow and discussed how people's corpses had been found next to the Russian military base at Khankala. You told us then that the procurator of the Chechen Republic, V.G. Chernov, had promised you to do everything possible to investigate this matter. Ten months have now passed. No-one has been brought to justice.
People arrested by federal forces continue to disappear. Their corpses are sometimes found, showing signs of torture. Some are found near the military base at Khankala.
As before, "clean-ups" are often carried out without representatives of the procurator's office being present. Even when representatives are present, this does not save peaceful inhabitants from violence. The facts of the "clean-ups" in Argun in December 2001, in the village of Tsotsin-Yurt (30 December 2001 to 3 January 2002) and Argun in January 2002 bear witness to this.
Everything we have said and written is supported by concrete information.
Since the Strasbourg seminar (26 to 27 November 2001) enough information has been gathered by us to put together a response to the statements of Russian officials, that the procurator's office has got the activities of the military in Chechnya under control and that the human rights situation there has improved noticeably. We would submit that the evaluations made by you on the basis of the Strasbourg seminar are at least premature. In our view, there are not yet any grounds for asserting that "…the competent authorities of the Russian Federation have committed themselves to this approach [protection of the civilian population], have already achieved concrete results and are at present trying hard to suppress such violations."
Similar evaluations by the international community only aggravate the serious situation in Chechnya. The isolated efforts of the procurator's office in relation to observing human rights is not enough to say that there is a move in a new direction. The situation in the war zone continues to be defined by breaches of human rights.
Yours sincerely
Orlov Oleg Petrovich - Chairman of the Board of Human Rights Centre "Memorial"
Kasatkina Tatiana Ivanovna - Executive Director of Human Rights Centre "Memorial"
Cherkasov Aleksandr Vladimirovich - Member of the Board of Human Rights Centre "Memorial"
