October 14, 2007	Sunday	Shawwal 1, 1428

MOSCOW, Oct 13: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticised the extent of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power as human rights activists urged her to pressure Moscow ahead of upcoming elections.

“There is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary,” Rice told reporters on the second day of a visit to Moscow.

Rice said she had raised the issue of human rights in meetings with Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and the two first deputy premiers, Dmitry Medvedev and Sergei Ivanov, and that she would also speak with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the issue.

She also held talks with civil society leaders at the residence of the US ambassador, where she said Russia must respect basic liberties.

“I am quite confident that your goal is to build institutions that are indigenous to Russia, that are Russian institutions,” Rice said at the start of a meeting with leading human rights advocates in Moscow.

However, that system must be “respectful of what we all know to be universal values: the rights of individuals to liberty and freedom, the right to worship as you please, and the right to assembly,” Rice said.

Rice was meeting with eight campaigners in the areas of civil and human rights during a visit to Moscow that came ahead of parliamentary elections in December and a presidential vote next March, at which time Putin is due to stand down.

Veteran rights defender Lyudmila Alekseyeva said she had told Rice that public criticism by world leaders was essential to bringing about improvement in Moscow’s poor human rights record.

“I’m certain that human rights in any country aren’t only an internal issue but concern the whole international community,” she told journalists.

Alekseyeva, who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group, said she had told Rice that “an authoritarian system” had been built under Putin’s leadership after the relative freedoms of the 1990s.

World leaders should “actually raise publicly problems of human rights and our constitutional rights and Russia’s obligations under international human rights conventions,” she said.

Another campaigner, Tatyana Lokshina of the Demos human rights centre, said Rice had shown a good understanding of the situation, freely conversing in Russian.

But Lokshina said after the meeting that she had warned Rice that Washington had lost moral authority and should work more closely with the European Union to show the seriousness of its criticisms.

“Considering the Iraq war and the Guantanamo problem and the Abu Ghraib scandal... the Russian side holds out its hands and says look what’s happening with you, how can you criticise us?

“It’s very important for the United States and EU to speak with one voice,” said Lokshina. Lokshina added that Russia had achieved only an “extremely perverted” form of stability in its war-torn southern province of Chechnya by using heavy-handed methods, while attacks by separatist insurgents had spread to neighbouring provinces.

“The situation in the North Caucasus remains really explosive,” she said.—AFP