Government Inaction in Response to Death Threats against Activists and Attacks by the Neo-Nazi Groups. Impunity of the Perpetrators

Encouraged by the government’s anti-NGO attitudes, law enforcement authorities fail to respond to increasing number of death threats and attacks by the neo-Nazi and other radical nationalist groups against NGO activists and offices, creating a climate of impunity conducive of repeated attacks, death threats, and murders of human rights defenders.

Death threats increasingly used by neo-Nazi groups against human rights defenders remain ignored and uninvestigated by the authorities.

They include death threats against Oksana Chelysheva and Stanislav Dmitievsky of Russian-Chechen Friendship Society in Nizhny Novgorod and Dmitry Krayukhin of United Europe Institute in Oryol in 2005. Office of St. Petersburg “Memorial” Society was broken in and vandalized several times in 2005-2006 and its director Vladimir Shnitke was physically assaulted. Head of North-Western Center for the Rights of the Roma Stephania Koulaeva received repeated telephone threats from racists. Names and home addresses of Svetlana Gannushkina of the “Civic Assistance” Committee and Memorial Human Rights Center and numerous other activists were published in various lists of “enemies of Russian people” on neo-Nazi web sites with direct calls for their violent “extermination.” No reaction by public officials followed. In October 2006 the FSB refused to open an investigation into the publication of death threats and private addresses and telephones in one of this death lists in the Internet arguing that there was no real threat, that “reputation of the people on the list and attitude towards them in the society is controversial” and the site was not really popular among radical groups anyway. The name of assassinated independent journalist and human rights defender Anna Politkovskaya had been also placed on neo-Nazi death lists for long while before her murder in October 2006.

Murders of a leading expert in studying racism and hate crime Nikolai Girenko in St Petersburg in 2005 and of Samba Lampsar, a student and an active member of the NGO African Unity, in April 2006, still remain unsolved. It is the impunity of the perpetrators and the government inaction to investigate and protect that makes violence against independent activists possible.

Boris Kreyndel, director of Tomsk Regional Public Human Rights Commission who has been active in advocating for Roma rights in Siberia, received death threats against his 16-year old daughter in a form of leaflets posted in his neighborhood with her name and address and a proposed year of her death. Having failed to find protection from the law enforcement bodies despite of appeals by NGOs and the Russian Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin to the Ministry of the Interior and the FSB, Kreyndel and his family had to seek a refuge in the USA where they were granted asylum.