From the editor: Taking Russia to court to expose the truth
Bill Bowring has been arrested and expelled from Russia twice and secretly filmed for a report by pro-Kremlin TV that called him the “British curator” of the Russian opposition, but he continues to travel to Russia to pursue human rights cases and give lectures. “If they’re going to kill me, they’ll do it here [in the UK],” he says. A self-described socialist barrister who founded the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre in 2003 and obtained a grant of a million euros for it from the European Commission, Bowring, 72, is also a professor of law at Birkbeck College, University of London. In a Zoom interview he told me why he still believes it’s important to challenge the Kremlin in domestic and international courts.
Bill Bowring (centre) was secretly filmed by NTV meeting human rights activists in Moscow
It can take years for a case to move through the European Court of Human Rights, but it’s worth doing this to investigate incidents such as the bombing of a refugee column that was given a green route by Russian forces to leave Grozny in 1999, Bowring says. The ECHR issued its judgment in favour of the victims in 2005. “The applicants were not after money, of course they weren’t, but what they wanted was the truth,” Bowring says. “We had [the judgment] printed in thousands of copies and they went all over Russia. If you want to know the truth about what happened to the Chechens at the beginning of the second Chechen war, you go to those judgments.” The ECHR often also orders Russia to pay compensation, and it usually complies. Boris Yeltsin brought Russia into the Council of Europe in 1996, which comes with participation in the ECHR, and this has been important to Russia since then, including for its campaigns on behalf of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the EU.
Bowring has also represented two ethnic Russians in Latvia who were prevented from standing as candidates in parliamentary elections because of their past membership of the Communist Party, and also young ethnic Russians who were mistreated by Estonian police during the 2007 rioting over the relocation of the Bronze Soldier war memorial. He is likewise scathing about the UK’s human rights record, saying that Winston Churchill created the ECHR as the “ideological counterpart of NATO” to try to prove that the West was serious about civil and political rights to compete with the Soviet Union, and to make socialism impossible in the UK, after his bruising defeat in 1945. Some of the first cases were brought against the UK over atrocities in Cyprus, the treatment of East African Asians, and the interning of Republican suspects in Northern Ireland, Bowring points out.
Nevertheless, on a visit to Russia in 2016 NTV - “the mouthpiece of the FSB” as Bowring calls it - made a 20-minute report including footage of him meeting activists Natalia Pelevina and Stanislav Dmitrievsky in a café to discuss how to bring Russian military war criminals to justice, accusing him of aiding Western security services and the causes of Ukrainian nationalists and Chechen terrorists, as well as plotting to overthrow Vladimir Putin’s regime. “They aren’t human rights defenders, they’re human rights traitors!” a senior Russian military officer raged. The pro-Kremlin channel suggested that Bowring was involved in a convoluted plot with the late US Senator John McCain and Kremlin opponent Bill Browder.
Bowring was arrested on arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in 2005 and deported after being held for six hours when he tried to observe Dmitrievsky’s trial on charges of inciting racial hatred for leading the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. He started proceedings in a Russian court while in the UK and got his visa back a year later. In 2007 he was arrested again in Astrakhan while training senior judges on behalf of the EU, which had only obtained a tourist visa for him. A meeting with the local human rights ombudsman, a retired general in the tax police, saved him when “five guys in leather jackets came to my hotel room at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning,” he says. With some help from the general Bowring was let off with a fine of 4,000 roubles and told to leave within the next few days.
Russia’s future is unpredictable, Bowring thinks, but he half-jokingly expresses hope that the next president will give him honorary citizenship for his services. “Putin has no successor. Most of the really big guns have gone. Lavrov is the really clever person in the government,” he says. “Putin is a weak individual. I think he does a job divvying up the money, and stealing a lot of it himself. Russia is a kleptocracy run by the secret police. There are probably millions of people in Moscow who detest the regime; there are thousands of young people now who have been in prison for short periods of time. Russia terrifies its rulers because when things snap it’s not going to be peace, love and democracy, any more than it was going to be in Afghanistan.”
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Fights between migrants becoming frequent
Mass fights have been breaking out regularly in Russia between rival migrant groups from Central Asian countries and Chechnya on the streets and in hostels, and dozens of people have been arrested or deported in recent weeks. In at least one fight in Moscow guns were fired. The fights are thought to be due to competition for jobs. “This is unacceptable. We don’t want these kinds of guests,” Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin commented. He said that in the past few months there have been 800 criminal cases connected to the fights. After just one fight near a metro station in Moscow on July 12 several people received knife wounds and 87 were jailed for 15 days, while 46 were deported. Eight more faced criminal charges for hooliganism.
Navalny’s spokeswoman is latest opposition activist to leave
Alexei Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh has reportedly become the latest top opposition activist to leave Russia, apparently going to Finland after being sentenced to 18 months of restricted freedoms in the “Covid case” on violating coronavirus regulations by organising protests in January. Moscow city councillor Dmitri Baranovsky was given the same sentence this week. Head of the Alliance of Doctors Dr. Anastasia Vasilieva, who is still awaiting her own verdict, was detained yesterday at her office and taken to court, where a prosecutor asked for her to be placed under house arrest before her trial, but the judge denied the request. In Rostov-on-Don RusNews journalist Bella Nasibyan, who has been working on the staff of candidate Alexander Ryabchuk, was jailed for five days for a picture of a Ryabchuk campaign poster with a “Smart Voting” sticker from Navalny’s campaign next to it. She was detained while dropping off her child at a daycare centre and charged with promoting an extremist organisation.
In a separate free speech case, stand-up comedian Idrak Mirzalizade was ordered to leave Russia permanently after serving a 10-day jail sentence in Moscow for insulting Russians during a performance. The Interior Ministry announced that his presence in the country was “undesirable”. Mirzalizade, a Belarusian citizen, had already gone to Turkey.
Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses continues
Sean Pike, a 49-year-old citizen of Russia and Guyana, is being forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor in jail in Moscow while awaiting trial for being a Jehovah’s Witness, according to the group. Pike was arrested with two other Jehovah’s Witnesses in late August. Pike is married with guardianship of two young children with chronic illnesses. On LinkedIn he describes himself as a senior project team leader at Drees & Sommer, a construction engineering company headquartered in Germany.
Meanwhile in Kurgan Oblast at the request of the European Court of Human Rights two seriously ill Jehovah’s Witnesses were released from jail ahead of trial. 56-year-old Anatoly Isakov has blood cancer, compression fractures of his spine and ribs and other illnesses. He had to stop chemotherapy because he was jailed and experienced severe pain due to not being provided with his medications. He was infected with Covid in jail. 65-year-old Alexander Lubin has vascular disease, hypertension and an autoimmune condition that affects various organs. His wife is disabled after suffering four strokes and due to his absence as a carer while he was in jail she started losing the use of her legs and had speech problems. The Kurgan Oblast clinical hospital told the judge in the men’s case that they had no illnesses that would prevent them from being sent to jail, where they were held from mid-July.
ECHR doesn’t find evidence of state involvement in Estemirova murder
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in the case of Estemirova v. Russia that the Russian government failed to comply with its obligations to furnish necessary facilities for the examination of a case, but also that there was no evidence of state involvement in the murder of human rights activist Natalia Estemirova in July 2009. Estemirova, 51, was abducted on her way to a bus stop after leaving her home in Grozny and her body was found in a field in Ingushetia. She had been shot in the head and chest. In 2010 Russian investigators charged militant Alkhazur Bashayev with Estemirova's abduction and murder. His whereabouts remain unknown.
“The Court was satisfied that the authorities had opened the investigation promptly and carried out investigative steps within days of the crime,” the ECHR said in a press release. “A suspect had been identified and charged. However, taking into account that the Court had not been provided with a significant part of the investigation file, it was not in a position to conclude that the investigation had been thorough. In particular certain contradictions in the expert evidence remained unsolved. It also pointed out that 3 the investigators had not explained why no traces of the DNA of the person who had been charged with the murder or no traces of the DNA of people from his illegal armed group had been found. More generally, the Court had doubts as to whether the investigators had made a genuine attempt to identify all the members of that group.”
The court ordered Russia to pay the applicant, Estemirova’s sister Svetlana, 20,000 euros in damages. Estemirova’s daughter Lana commented, “I am glad that the court found that there was no proper investigation, but otherwise this is an extremely disappointing judgment.”
Violinist Igor Oistrakh dies at 90
Acclaimed violinist Igor Oistrakh died in Moscow on August 14 at the age of 90, it was reported this week. Born in Odessa, he was known as a soloist and for his joint recitals with his father David. He also performed with his wife, pianist Natalia Zertsalova, and their son Valery, a violinist. Oistrakh taught at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.