Eight organisations have called on the Human Rights Council to address the breaches in human rights by the Russian Federation, following the arbitrary prohibition and violent dispersal of a peaceful protest.
The protest was planned as a response to the change of Aleksei Navalny’s non-custodial sentence, to a prison sentence of three and a half years. Fourteen hundred protesters were arrested for their participation, 140 were beaten in detention and 90 face criminal charges. Overall, more than 11,000 people were arbitrarily detained in over 125 Russian cities.
After the change in his sentence, Navalny was moved to Detention Centre No. 3 in the town of Kolchugino. In an Instagram post, he described the conditions of the detention centre, stating,
“I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow.”
As part of the centre’s “psychological methods”, Navalny was woken every hour of the night, due to him being considered a flight risk.
The organisations call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to immediately release Navalny as well as all those having been arbitrarily arrested and detained. Furthermore, they ask that Russia respect its obligation under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) by putting an end to its intimidation and harassment of civil society activists.
The Russian Federation’s response to this peaceful protest is not unusual. In the last year alone there have been many instances of human rights violations, including wrongful prosecutions against journalists with false charges of terrorism and treason, refusal to investigate police violence aimed at journalists, as well as scare tactics aimed at halting their journalistic work.
On the 13th of March, the Russian Federation used the 2015 ‘undesirable organizations’ law as reason to arrest almost 200 attendees of the federal forum of municipal deputies in Moscow. The forum was organised by the United Democrats with the purpose of exchanging skills for running election campaigns and working with grassroots candidates.
Since Russia has its regional and parliamentary elections coming up in September, the raid was another instance of police scare tactics aimed at intimidating potential opposition to the ruling political party, United Russia. This demonstrates Russia’s consistent violation of the rights to assemble peacefully, rights of association, as well as the rights to liberty and freedom of expression, despite them being written both in Russia’s Constitution and in international law.