It's been less than a week since valiant Russian human rights groups Memorial won Europe's llustrious human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, but it seems that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov is determined to pull the plug on any celebrations. Kadyrov won a civil libel suit against the organization's Chairman Oleg Orlov earlier this month, regarding the activist's public affirmation that the Chechen leader was responsible for the murder of fellow Memorial representative Natalya Estemirova in July.  Kadyrov has now opened a criminal libel suit against Orlov, which carries a prison sentence of up to three or four years. This from the AP: The case stems from Orlov's statement in July that Chechen President ...

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.

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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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Somebody from Freedom House wrote an op/ed in the Moscow Times about Russia's moves to water down its responsibilities before the European Court of Human Rights.

Georgy Matyushkin, Russia's representative to the European Court of Human Rights, believes that cases already submitted to the court would be retracted and sent back for review by Russian courts. This includes thousands of cases that deal with counterterrorist operations in the North Caucasus, particularly in Chechnya. The law could also prevent any future cases from reaching the European court.

Simply put, the new law has the potential to cut off the world from knowing about the impunity and lawlessness in the North Caucasus. (...)

According to Memorial, there are up to 5,000 people missing from the second Chechen war alone. So far, the European Court of Human Rights has made rulings on only several dozen of these cases because of a severe backlog.

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