ERRC to Appear at Helsinki Commission Briefing on Roma in Russia

21 September 2004

In recent days, the world has looked on with deep sympathy as innocent Russians endured the latest in a spate of terrorist attacks targeting civilians, in this case including schoolchildren. But the international community knows little about the reverse side of the anti-terrorist, anti-drug and anti-crime offensive of the Putin government: the accompanying further degradation of Russian public life and the dramatic narrowing of both the civil liberties and, indeed the basic safety of persons who had already been the most vulnerable victims of racism and discrimination. For such persons, particularly those of perceived Caucasian or Gypsy background, daily life has become marked by the permanent threat of arbitrary search, detention and physical abuse by police officers, or of arbitrary law enforcement by persons acting fully outside the law, who have apparently deputised themselves on the basis of perceived or invented popular mandate. The Russian government has to date done little to nothing to stem the tide of deeply ingrained racial prejudice fuelling both arbitrary acts by police and judicial authorities, as well as the popular pressure on public authorities to exercise draconian measures on certain ethnic groups. The result is an alarming pattern of human rights abuse of Roma and of perpetrators' immunity from justice.