The human rights situation in Russia has “steadily deteriorated” since President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a UN expert said, describing a “seismic decline” that has hit vulnerable groups such as minorities and migrants particularly hard.
“Over the past 3 1/2 years, Russian authorities have pursued a deliberate strategy to wipe out dissent through intensified censorship, politically motivated prosecutions,” and other measures, Mariana Katzarova, special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, said in a new report.
“Anti-war dissenters and activists are serving years in prison, not for crimes but for courage,” Katzarova told a press conference on September 22 during a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“The repression is escalating,” she said.
In the report, Katzarova said that “civic space has been systematically and purposefully destroyed” and the authorities have “transformed public institutions into instruments of repression and war.”
An independent expert appointed in 2023, Katzarova is the first UN-backed monitor of the human rights situation in Russia, one of five permanent UN Security Council members. She does not speak on behalf of the UN.
The clampdown has had a “particularly severe impact on vulnerable groups, especially women, LGBT persons, national and ethnic minorities, Indigenous Peoples, religious groups and migrants, who have been specifically targeted and scapegoated in official rhetoric and practice,” the report said.
In the North Caucasus, a “relentless descent into lawlessness has enabled widespread violations, including gender-based violence, femicide, torture and ill-treatment, enforced disappearance and brutal suppression of the rights of LGBT persons,” it said.
Russian authorities have been seeking to stifle dissent throughout Putin’s quarter-century in power. The clampdown widened after he returned to the presidency in 2012 after a stint as prime minister and has intensified further during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
As tools of repression, the Kremlin is using “broad public safety and national security provisions,” as well as expanded legislation branding individuals and organizations as “foreign agents” and “undesirables,” the report said.
Katzarova also described the “widespread and systematic recourse to torture and ill-treatment” by law enforcement officials, members of the armed forces, and others as “endemic,” and said the authorities are also using the Soviet-era tactic of forced psychiatric treatment.
“Punitive psychiatry has returned as a tool against anti-war voices,” she told journalists.
The report cited “a clear pattern of health professionals participating in and condoning the most abhorrent torture, especially of Ukrainian detainees.”
“Accountability and justice, and the release of all Ukrainian civilian detainees, Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war, held by both sides, deported Ukrainian children and all Russian political prisoners, must inform any peace talks and [peace] process,” it said.
