The UN Human Rights Council has accused Russia of using secret detention centres. The Human Rights Council's report has been available in the Internet for more than a month now, despite protests from many countries. The report is likely to come under discussion during the UN session that's due to open in early March.
The Western press was quick to describe the so-called "Russian" part of the report as scandalous, but Moscow is strongly opposed to the report content. Alexander Trushev, Russia's Representative at the EU Chamber of Lawyers, says the UN report is biased, and elaborates.
The report, Alexander Trushev says, charges a great number of nations with having covert prisons, where people are held without a court sentence. But does Russia have this kind of "zindans", as President Medvedev said recently when accusing those violating human rights? Some individuals did have this kind of their own private "holes" in Chechnya and other North Caucasus republics (by way of paying tribute to the medieval tradition). Russian officials try to spot the whereabouts of such "zindans" and do away with them. But what does this have to do with the UN report about secret prisons, - an instrument of illegal coercion of inmates into giving evidence through the use of unlawful methods by government security agencies? I have no doubt whatsoever, Alexander Trushev says, that Russia has no such covert detention centres, albeit legalized by secret enactments.
The Russian expert does not rule out that the scandalous accusation of Moscow may turn out to be an instrument to bring pressure to bear, an attempt to coerce Russia into conceding on some issues. Unfortunately, this kind of "games" has been part and parcel of world practice.
But the head of the Russian Human Rights Centre MEMORIAL Oleg Orlov feels that some claims in the report are quite trustworthy, specifically the abductions and the illegal holding of people at this kind of detention centres in the North Caucasus.
The situation in the Caucasus has grown somewhat stable in recent years, Oleg Orlov says. But cases continue to be reported now and then, involving the detention of citizens by armed men in broad daylight and taking them through all checkpoints, with no traffic police officers searching such vehicles.
But the authors of the report have mixed things up. It follows from the document that the authors possess no clear-cut information about the current situation in Russia's Caucasus, claims an expert with the Institute of International Relations Yelena Ponomariova, and elaborates.
Actually, this is all about gangland killings, about gangsters that have survived the large-scale antiterrorist operations. At that time government troops failed to control the hard-of-access part of the Caucasus mountainous country. But the situation has since changed. Now it is absolutely incredible that Chechnya, Ingushetia or Dagestan would have some secret prisons. Why couldn't UN functionaries be more specific about such prisons, so that Russian officials could verify their information?
Russian experts insist that the situation calls for a thorough analysis and clear-cut legal explanations, since Russia has nothing to conceal to that effect. Meanwhile western reporters should instead recall scandals around the CIS secret prisons in some European countries.
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