According to the published annualreport of the International Committee to Protect Journalists, in one year Russia has moved from 9th to more "honorable" 8th place in the list of countries where crimes against journalists, i.e., a so-called Index of impunity, remain unpunished.
On the situation in Russia as far as the murders of journalists by the terrorist gang of of the FSB are concerned, the CPJ report states:
- "Despite recent international pressure and domestic pledges to address impunity, little progress was reported in the last year in winning convictions in journalist murders.
Russia moved up one spot in this year's index, reflecting three murders committed in 2009. In all, 18 press killings have gone unsolved since 2000. Two of the journalists killed in 2009 worked for a single newspaper, the independent Novaya Gazeta.
The victims included the internationally respected reporter and human rights defender Natalya Estemirova, who was abducted from her home and shot dead in the volatile North Caucasus region".
On May 6, a Moscow human rights defender, Nina Ognianova, speaking in Washington with testimony before the Commission on Human Rights in the US Congress (Tom Lantos Commission), strongly criticized Russia's policy on human rights.
The witness Ognianova drew attention of the US congressmen on the following issues:
- Medvedev and Putin share the moral responsibility for Russia's Impunity of murders of journalists.
- Russia is a partner of the US and Europe, so impunity is not an internal affair of Russia, as Russian authorities claim.
- A further restriction of freedom in Russia has a new draft law strengthening the rights of the FSB. If this bill passed the broadly worded amendments would give the FSB the same broad censorship powers that its predecessor, the KGB, had in Soviet times, said Moscow human rights defender at the hearing in Washington.
It's amazing, that democratic media in Russia and, first of all, Western radio stations in Russian, which are funded by Western taxpayers, reported absolutely nothing about the above-mentioned issues. In fact, they just ignored them, although it is their duty to report about such problems in Russia.
The Kavkaz Center for the umpteenth time has to do their job and publish purely democratic, human rights information for Russian readers.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
