The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is very concerned about the safety of journalist Elena Milashina and the head of the Committee against Torture, Igor Kaliapin. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has made clear threats to arrest both, calling them “terrorists.” The Norwegian Helsinki Committee takes the situation very seriously, and asks the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to raise the security situation of Milashina and Kaliapin with Russian authorities. Both of them have visited Norway on several occasions.
In recent weeks, Kadyrov has made several direct threats to his critics. Last week, Zarema Musaeva was abducted from her home in Nizhny Novgorod. Musaeva is the mother of lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev, who until recently was a member of the Committee against Torture. Ramzan Kadyrov has publicly stated that “the whole family’s place is either behind bars or below ground”. The Nizhny Novgorod police did not investigate the abduction. In December 2021, dozens of people, relatives of Yangulbaev and other critics of the regime were abducted in Chechnya. The Helsinki Committee was among several organizations that last week sent a letter to Vladimir Putin demanding an end to the lawlessness.
We see that it is becoming increasingly dangerous for civil society to act in Russia, and the work is becoming increasingly risky. Journalists, independent politicians, activists and critics of the regime are physically attacked, persecuted and even killed. Some of the killings have been carried out by people from Chechnya, both in the region, in Moscow and even abroad. The general deterioration of the human rights situation in Russia, the stigmatization of civil society organizations as “foreign agents”, “extremists” and “terrorists”, encourage security structures to violence and give them “carte-blanche” for arbitrary persecution and lawlessness.
The Committee against Torture and Novaya Gazeta received the Helsinki Committee’s Andrei Sakharov’s Freedom Award in 2017 for their work in uncovering, investigating and making public serious human rights violations. The Committee is a regular contributor to the UN Committee against Torture. It is well known that Dmitry Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta, received the Nobel Peace Prize last December.