Russian Gay Activists Urge EU to Investigate Chechen Atrocities on Gay Men
[From BRUSSELS] Russian civil society activists are urging European Union member states to investigate crimes allegedly committed by Chechen authorities on gay men.
Igor Kochetkov, the founder and council member of the Russian LGBT Network, told the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee on September 25 that his organization had helped 76 people to leave Chechnya.
"We should understand that those evacuated from Chechnya are still under threat not only in Chechnya but also outside. The Chechen authorities look for them directly or through their relatives and try to intimidate them," he told the committee.
Kochetkov also said that there were dozens of victims and witnesses of crimes that live in EU countries that are prepared to testify but that "they need guarantees of safety for themselves and their relatives."
"If the EU is really interested in investigating these crimes it is not just sufficient to just accept these refugees, you could launch you own investigations, you could give fully-fledged state support and protection of witnesses and victims of those crimes," he said.
The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta has reported that more than 100 men were detained in Chechnya on the basis of the assumption that they were gay, and that at least three of them were killed. Others were reportedly tortured.
That reporting has been corroborated in part or in whole by rights groups and RFE/RL.
The Kremlin has downplayed the accusations, as has Chechnya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who has asserted that homosexuality does not exist in Chechen society.
[Radio Free Europe]
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Agents of the Russian state have committed serious human rights abuses, including torture, since Russia occupied and seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a UN human rights report says.
The rights situation in Crimea "has significantly deteriorated under Russian occupation," the UN Human Rights Office says in the September 25 report, also citing disappearances, infringements of the Geneva Conventions, and violations of international law.
It says that "grave human rights violations, such as arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment and torture, and at least one extra-judicial execution were documented."
"There is an urgent need for accountability for human rights violations and abuses and for providing the victims with redress," UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement.
Russia seized Crimea in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegal by dozens of countries, after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by mass protests in Kyiv.
Many Western countries have imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the takeover of the Black Sea peninsula.
The UN report says the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian and human rights laws were violated when Moscow replaced Ukrainian laws with Russian laws in Crimea and imposed Russian citizenship on tens of thousands of residents.
The imposition of Russian citizenship had “a particularly harsh impact” on residents "who formally rejected citizenship; civil servants who had to renounced their Ukrainian citizenship or lose their jobs, and Crimean residents who did not meet the legal criteria" for Russian citizenship and "became foreigners," the UN report says.
People without Russian citizenship who hold a residency permit in Crimea are now "deprived of important rights" and "do not enjoy equality before the law," it says. It said they "cannot own agricultural land, vote and be elected, register a religious community, apply to hold a public meeting, hold positions in the public administration, and reregister their private vehicle on the peninsula."
"Education in the Ukrainian language has almost disappeared from Crimea," the report says.
The report says hundreds of prisoners and pretrial detainees have been transferred to Russia, a practice it says is "strictly prohibited by international humanitarian law."
The report also says at least three detainees died after not receiving adequate medical care in custody.
In addition to seizing Crimea, Russia fomented separatism across much of Ukraine after Yanukovych's ouster and has supported separatists fighting against Kyiv's forces in a conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
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