GENEVA: The rights situation inside Russia has become “much worse” in the past year amid a tightening “state-sponsored system of fear and punishment”, a United Nations expert warned on Monday.

“Nobody is safe,” Mariana Katzarova, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, told reporters in Geneva.

Already a year ago, the independent expert said repression had hit “unprecedented” levels amid the war Moscow is waging in Ukraine. But the quashing of dissent had intensified since then, Katzarova warned as she presented her latest report.

“The country is now run by a state sponsored system of fear and punishment, including the use of torture with absolute impunity,” Katzarova said. “Human rights defenders, journalists and political figures are persecuted and incarcerated in greater numbers, anti-war dissent of any kind is criminalised, police violence is condoned,” she said.

In addition, she pointed to the increased use of arbitrary arrests while “prison conditions have worsened with increased solitary confinement and death in custody”. Political prisoners, the number of which she put at more than 1,300, suffered the worse conditions as “many are tortured”. For the expert, the death in custody of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last February was “just one example of the brutal treatment of the political opposition”.

Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2024