Minorities Under Siege: Hate Crimes and Intolerance in the Russian Federation

IV. Official Anti-Discrimination Bodies

All Council of Europe members are encouraged to establish specialized anti-discrimination bodies in line with the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance's (ECRI) General Policy Recommendation No. 2, adopted in June 1997, and No. 7, adopted in December 2002. The 1997 recommendation calls on members states to consider "setting up a specialized body to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance at the national level if such a body does not already exist." These bodies are to be tasked with providing assistance to victims and mandated by law with investigative powers, the right to initiate and participate in court proceedings monitor legislation, and provide advice to legislative and executive authorities, as well as to raise awareness of issues concerning racism and racial discrimination.

ECRI's General Policy Recommendation No. 7, on national legislation to combat racism, reaffirms the recommendation for an effective specialized anti-discrimination body in every member state:

The law should provide for the establishment of an independent specialized body to combat racial discrimination at a national level. The law should include within the competence of such a body: assistance to victims; investigation powers; the right to initiate, and participate in court proceedings; monitoring legislation and advice to legislative and executive authorities; awareness raising of issues of racism and racial discrimination among society and promotion of polices and practices to ensure equal treatment.

Although there are institutions in Russia that perform some of the functions outlined in these recommendations, no specialized anti-discrimination body exists that meets these Council of Europe standards.

Two agencies have some oversight on matters of human rights, including hate crimes: the Office of the Ombudsman for Human Rights, headed by Vladimir Lukin; and the Presidential Council for Developing Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights (replacing the Presidential Council on Human Rights in 2004), headed by Ella Pamfilova. As noted in the Russian Federation's most recent report to the CERD three years ago, federal laws provide the Ombudsman with the right to review investigations and cases, request documentation, and issue queries. Laws also protect the Ombudsman from interference with his work or from outside influences on his positions. The Ombudsman's authority, however, is limited to a largely advisory function: the Prosecutor's Office and the Ministry of the Interior are responsible for investigating and prosecuting all crimes.

Both Lukin and Pamfilova have spoken out on hate crimes and political extremism. As noted above, on January 31, 2006 they sent a joint letter to the Prosecutor General, the Chairman of the Supreme Court, and the Minister of Justice in which they expressed their concern over the ineffective implementation of the laws intended to combat extremism. The letter outlined a number of concerns and criticisms, including:

• Threats directed at minorities as well as against judges and officials by nationalist groups are published openly and generally go without punishment.
• Law enforcement officials more often than not do not open investigations when public figures and officials incite ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, including when media outlets are involved.
• Even in those cases where investigations into cases of incitement are opened, the two-year statute of limitations often expires before action can be taken. In about half the cases which do go to trial and sentencing, conditional punishments are handed down; these often fail to stop those convicted from continuing their work.
• Laws have been interpreted broadly and used against civic activists and journalists, as in the cases (cited above) against the organizers of the Sakharov Museum's "Caution, Religion" exhibit and against Stanislav Dmitrievsky, editor of the newspaper Pravozaschita (Human Rights Defense).[35]  

Although limited in its coverage of discriminatory violence, the 2005 report of the Russian Ombudsman notes the "sharp leap" in the number of incidents of hate crimes, citing St. Petersburg and Voronezh as the two leading cities in this regard, with ten and nine serious attacks, respectively, on foreign citizens in the first ten months of 2005. The report further calls attention to the absence of timely reactions on the part of law enforcement officials to extremist violence and the general tolerance by local authorities of well-known extremist organizations and publications of a "nationalist and Fascist" nature.[36]

Earlier, in a June 2005 statement at an international conference of ombudsmen, Lukin warned of the threat of "aggressive intolerance" in Russia, "on the part of certain representatives of the majority." He described a longstanding situation of official indifference as an important part of the problem:[37]

We should reproach federal authorities, and sometimes regional and local authorities, but primarily [officials of the] judicial and prosecution systems, [who] have been trying to ignore these incidents for a long time, pretending that they are ordinary hooliganism and they are not connected in any way with the problem of ethnic extremism. It is absolutely wrong to close our eyes to this. President [Vladimir] Putin was right when he said there is nothing stupider and more ignorant than the slogan 'Russia for Russians.' ... This is a slogan for civil war and the extermination of many people, including Russians.

Pamfilova reportedly acknowledged in a televised interview that a part of the reason for the prevalence of racism was racism within the government establishment. In a program on racist violence by presenter Nikolay Svanidze, broadcast on October 14, 2005, Pamfilova did not reject a suggestion that officials in law enforcement provided protection for the skinhead movement. [38]

As for protectors in high places, I do not know about that for certain but I suspect that much. I know that many people who hold such views are guiding the skinheads while at the same time staying in the background themselves. They occupy different posts, perhaps not very high ones, in law-enforcement agencies. There are such people there and they often do cover up such crimes. I think that such people work in all law enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, efforts to combat these trends through awareness and training have foundered. In 2001, the government launched a federal program on "forming an attitude of tolerance and preventing extremism in Russian society," which was to have trained specialists and introduced schools-based tolerance education. Although the program was reportedly only in its initial stage in 2004, when surveyed by the Towards a Civil Society Foundation, it was suspended in June of that year, when the government ceased financing the program. It was reportedly the only federally-funded social program to be closed down that year. Initially established as a five-year program, its termination came in the face of a growing need for institutional measures on a national scale to combat discrimination. In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Ella Pamfilova contended that the program was eliminated out of "bureaucratic carelessness" and that "a mistake had been made which must be corrected."[39] ECRI, in its 2005 Third Report on the Russian Federation, expressed its deep regret that the program had been abandoned and called upon the Russian authorities to reconsider this decision.[40]