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October 5, 2003
Review: Reporting on racism
“I SHOUTED for help and a policeman came. The first thing he did was to ask for my documents.”
The above are the words of a female Liberian refugee and journalism student describing an attack on her by skinheads in Moscow in February 2002, quoted in ‘Dokumenty!’, an Amnesty International report on racial discrimination in the Russian Federation published in January 2003. It aims to create awareness of continuing racial discrimination in Russia by emphasizing that many of those living in Russia are not in de facto possession of the rights to which they are entitled under national, international and European law.
The report contains nine chapters and two appendices. The first part contains an outline of Amnesty’s work against racism in general and in the Russian Federation in particular, an informative historical survey of the meaning of ethnicity and nationality and an elucidation of existing laws on racial discrimination. The second and main part of the report deals with the various forms of racial discrimination and the main groups it is directed at.
The report ends with Amnesty’s recommendations to the government of the Russian Federation.
Amnesty broadly lists four categories of people that are affected by racist attitudes: 1) citizens of the Russian Federation, such as Jews and Chechens; 2) former citizens of the Soviet Union legally resident on the territory of the Russian Federation such as Meshkhetians, Kurds, Armenians and Ossetians; 3) migrant workers and small traders from former Soviet republics in search of economic betterment; and 4) foreigners, such as asylum-seekers, refugees and students mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The problems faced today by some citizens of the former Soviet Union date back to Stalin’s forcible deportations of whole ethnic groups during the second world war. The second chapter provides useful background information on how, during the Perestroika period in 1989, the process of restoring the rights of such peoples was begun but suffered a setback in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Important issues such as their right to have a Russian passport have yet to be resolved, their old Soviet passports will no longer be valid after December 2003, leading to their effective statelessness. This is because local authorities are violating federal law by setting up restrictive and racially motivated registration procedures, as in the case of the Meshkhetians in Krasnodar Territory. Legally, registration should mean that the police is informed about where one lives.
However, local authorities misuse it to deny people the legal right to register and consequently, most of their civil rights. This is then used as a pretext for harassing those applying for Russian citizenship and asylum-seekers by detention or fining. Racism is also evident from public statements of leaders in the local media against ethnic groups who have been legally resident in some areas on the coming into force of the Citizenship Law in February 1992.
The statements openly declare selected unwanted groups to be criminals, unwanted ‘guests’ and support legislation making registration increasingly difficult, with the aim of forcing them out. Foreigners, especially Africans married to Russian citizens are denied their legal right to citizenship.
The persecution of Jews began in the Stalin era, and they continue to face discrimination to this day, just as the Roma. Chechens form another major group targeted for racial abuse by various sections of Russian society, especially since the 1999 Moscow bombings for which Putin declared the Chechens to be responsible without it having been proven to this day. This was used as a pretext for launching the second Chechen war the same year. This unsubstantiated accusation effectively signalled that Chechens could be persecuted at will.
According to information provided by the human rights NGO Civic Assistance, police planted drugs, arms and explosives on scores of Chechens while carrying out searches in the wake of the 1999 and 2000 bombings in Moscow to extort confessions from them. Several case studies are provided in the report. Officials can act with impunity, as there is a general feeling that racism is tolerated in society. Victims of racial abuse and torture at the hands of police refrain from lodging complaints because securing the conviction of a police officer is practically impossible.
When racist attacks by private individuals, such as skinheads, are reported to the police, victims are usually told that the perpetrators cannot be prosecuted because of their being under-age. Surveys cited in the report prove that in the great majority of cases, the attackers are well over 14, the age of criminal responsibility in the Russian Federation. Owing to these and many other practices, those affected by racial abuse have little or no confidence in the law-enforcing authorities.
On asylum, Amnesty comes to the conclusion that officials and the public have no conception of asylum; it is seen as a migration problem, and that the consideration of asylum seeker’s application is influenced more by his or her ethnic or national origin than by evidence of persecution. The rejection rate, according to the UNHCR’s Moscow office, is 96 per cent. Most of those who remain are not treated according to international law, i.e. they can be subject to arbitrary detentions etc.
Among the recommendations made by Amnesty, two stand out as absolutely key: 1) That the Russian Federation ratify Protocol No. 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights, prohibiting discrimination by any public authority on many grounds including that of race; and 2) that curricula and teaching methods be reviewed to eliminate racist attitudes and negative stereotyping in society through education, under the five-year State Programme on Tolerance and Prevention of Extremism in Russian Society started in 2001. They are essential to the implementation of the other recommendations, such as combating prejudiced policing and the protection of minorities from arbitrary detention.
On the whole, Amnesty’s treatment of the issue is fairly even-handed; it concedes that virtually no society is free from racism, that the Russian Federation is not the only state to whose law enforcement agencies reflect rather than combat discriminatory attitudes in society, and that President Putin and the Prosecutor General have publicly committed themselves to zero tolerance of racism in future. To ensure that the government keeps its word, however, it is important that NGOs, Amnesty and other human rights organizations keep up their pressure on it. The UN monitors the Russian Federation’s measures against racial discrimination through the periodical reports that all member states of the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination are obliged to submit to it. In February 2003, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Prejudice or CERD concluded from the last report submitted to it by the Russian Federation that not enough progress had been made in the various fields related to this issue. But then, these things take time. After all, it has taken British courts a good many decades to declare “Paki” a term denoting racial abuse.
‘Dokumenty!’ — Discrimination on Grounds of Race in the Russian Federation
Amnesty International Publications, International Secretariat, Benenson House, I Easton Street, London WCIX oDW, United Kingdom
Website: www.amnesty.org/russia
ISBN 0-86210-322-3
88pp. Price not listed
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