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Human rights situation in Russia unsatisfactory, says ombudsman
Interfax
Moscow, 26 March: The number of complaints about human rights violations has sharply grown in Russia in the past few years, presidential human rights commissioner Oleg Mironov has said.
He called the observation of human rights unsatisfactory. He said his office receives more than 2,000 complaints every month and that action is taken in one in five cases.
"The rights and liberties of individuals are still violated on the whole spectrum covered by international standards, and in some areas such as Chechnya on a mass scale," Mironov said in an interview with [Russian newspaper] Nezavisimaya Gazeta published on Tuesday [26 March].
At the same time he attributed the growing number of complaints to the increasing importance of the commissioner, his influence on people who do not want to tolerate the arbitrariness of officials, and not to a skyrocketing rise in human rights violations.
In Mironov's opinion, there is a true threat to the freedom of speech in Russia.
"The cases of NTV and TV6 channels are presented as economic disputes, but why then should things be driven to the closure of the channels," he said, adding that 80 per cent of the Russian media is controlled by the federal or local authorities and therefore "it is difficult to speak of their independence".
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