Beijing 2008, Sochi 2014, Rio 2016: BRIC nations are having an Olympic boom.  It is an unfortunate fact, however, that the Olympic Games tend to spell trouble for civil liberties when taking place in authoritarian regimes.  One only has to look at the notorious examples of human rights infringements occurring before the Beijing event for confirmation - as Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch does in today's Washington Post.  Will the questionable property expropriations, hushing of foreign journalists and despoliation of local ecosystems familiar to Beijing also be witnessed at the Sochi Games in 2014?Why worry now about the Sochi Games? This year alone, several Russian rights activists and journalists have been killed within a few hundred miles of Sochi. ...

I live to this day as well...

Grigory Pasko, journalist

Instead of an epigraph: «Endpiece of a modern fairytale: «And had the not been rehabilitated, they live to this day as well» -- Jerzy Lec

Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда.It goes without saying that I am disappointed by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights. But no more than that. The ECHR decision in any case is belated and doesn't change anything in my life. Much worse is that this decision, in essence, is a spit into the souls of thousands of people: both those who are still waiting for positive decisions with respect ...

Reporters without Borders, an international press freedom watchdog group, has been suddenly and unexpectedly stripped of their travel visas to attend an event to honor Anna Politkovskaya and screen a new documentary.  I first caught this news late last night from RFE/RL, who writes that RSF was "shocked" by the government's decision to not allow them into the country.This comment struck me as somewhat amusing and interesting.  We all remember that the very same thing was done to Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, right after the organization had published a critical (and very well done) report on the rights situation in Russia.  Hugo Chavez is fond of doing pulling the same moves on HRW, and likely RSF in the future.  When we pretend to be shocked and surprised that the Kremlin acts like an ...

Megan K. Stack has a very sad report in the Los Angeles Times today on the proliferation of heroin use in Russia, which has been dramatically increased from the booming narcotics industry coming out of Afghanistan - another thorn in the U.S.-Russia relations.  As the article shows, many regional governments are woefully unprepared to handle drug addiction epidemics."It's a catastrophe for us. We were completely unprepared for this turn of events," says Evgeny Bryun, Moscow's chief drug addiction specialist. "We have our own lost generation."The transition from a Soviet state largely free from heroin to a booming nation awash in the drug has been painful and dark, marked by widespread public ignorance of the risks and symptoms of addiction, lingering shame and stigma, and muddled government efforts at treatment. Methadone, which is widely used ...

In the famous film Borat, Kazakhstan is shown, to put it mildly, as a strange state. However, the government of Kazakhstan, extremely irritated by the film at the beginning, now, as they are reporting, has replaced wrath with kindness - it has already in practice felt the growing interest in its country: people have wanted to see this mysterious Kazakhstan with their own eyes and are now storming tourist agencies.

Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда.

From Russia to Almaty I flew on a half-empty airplane: Russians, apparently, know even without Borat what and how it's really like there. In Almaty itself I was amazed by two things: the almost

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Usually when human rights groups lobby to foreign governments not to extradite a Chechen back to Russia, their concerns are well founded by fears of torture, inadequate legal rights, and a less than shining record on treatment of detainees.  That was the case of Murat Gasayev, a Chechen who fled to Spain after being arrested and tortured in connection with the bombing of some buildings in Ingushetia in 2007.  Despite protests from rights groups, the Spaniards decided to ship Gasayev back into Russian custody in December 2008.Defying any grim expectations of a "prison accident" or suspicious suicide in his cell, just a few days ago Gasayev was released from jail after ten months pre-trial detention.  Needless ...

TODAY: Violence explodes in Ingushetia; Interior Minister fired. Wall rumored to be built between Georgia and Abkhazia; Georgia to leave CIS.  Russian diplomats expelled.  Dozens missing in hydropower plant disaster.  Ship found.President Medvedev has dismissed Ingush Interior Minister Ruslan Meiriyev after a suicide bombing in Nazran which killed 20 people and injured 138.  Tatyana Lokshina from Human Rights Watch has described the attack as 'a big blow to the Kremlin', which is wrestling with insurgency in all corners of the region.  Ingushetian President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov has said that it is in the interests of 'the United States, Britain, and Israel' to destabilize the Caucasus, and 'to prevent Russia from reviving the former Soviet might'.  A ...

Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch has a new piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free taking a look at the recent string of murders in Chechnya.  What's interesting here was the transparent way in which the Chechen state security forces got themselves involved in the brutal murders of Sadulayeva and Dzhabrailov, with careless abandon about who would witness what they were doing.  As noted below, they even left a phone number before going about the murder.  Usually one would expect at least a minimal effort to cover up the crime and conceal the state's authorship, but this is just another unfortunate definition of the impunity which reigns.This time that of Zarema Sadulayeva and Alik Dzhabrailov, from a small Chechen charity, Save the Generation.They were found dead in the trunk of Dzhabrailov's car ...

TODAY: Shock reverberates around Chechyna NGO worker murder; Kadryov reacts with attack on Estemirova.  NATO-Russia relations warming up; new kind of space race? Medvedev pulls no punches on Ukraine leadership. 'Merchant of Death' won't be extradited. Art attack. 'We thought that after Natalya's [Estermirova]death there would at least be a lull', says the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Russia on the murder of Save the Generation director Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband.  The organization's former director was also murdered in 2005, the Washington Post reports.  'Is a death squad roaming Grozny under official sanction or are these horrible but unrelated killings?' asks the Times.  'Why aren't Western governments doing more to ...

When the Chechen human rights worker Natalia Estemirova was snatched off the streets of Grozny and later deposited in a roadside ditch with a few bullets to the head, the grotesque brutality of the act was hard to swallow.  In response, not all the much was done.  In Russia, the event was not even a blip on the media radar, and mourners at her memorial were even harassed and arrested.  Outside of Russia, Estemirova was given generous and sympathetic treatment (here is a good example), but the sadness and outrage on the editorial pages did not translate into any concrete political action.The costs of inaction on the renewed violence in Chechnya are very high, as this week we ...