Moscow Update

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Subject: Moscow Update

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Moscow Update



Moscow Update

Susan Brazier
for
Memorial Human Rights Centre, Moscow
27 September 1999

Russia appears beyond doubt now to be heading to all-out war in
Chechnya and the rhetoric and administrative actions taken against the
country's Chechen population outside that region grow more extreme
each day. The following is a short update on the current situation in
the capital. It should be noted that reports are being received from
human rights groups in other parts of the country of similar practices
of enforced re-registration and police abuses.

Detailed reports prepared by the Memorial Human Rights Centre on this
subject will be made available as soon as they are translated.

On 21 September, the re-registration of Moscow's "guests" - one of
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's "radical measures" announced after the
recent spate of bombings in Russia - came to an end. Approximately
74,000 people were re-registered with the Moscow authorities by that
date; over 10,000 individuals not registered in the capital came
forward and "voluntarily" requested official registration.

Authorities stated that as of Sept. 26, roughly 20,000 people who had
applied for re-registration had been refused. Authorities have
indicated that most of the people who were refused were people who
"could not adequately explain their business in Moscow"; "legitimate"
reasons for being in the capital reportedly included work, medical
treatment or education. According to Izvestiya, in addition, market
traders from the Caucasus, "illegal" builders from Ukraine and Asia
and prostitutes from Moldova were also refused. In the words of the
daily, those that could be "found fault with" lost the right to live
in the capital.

The authorities have made it clear that the next step is to remove
these people from Moscow. On 21 September, the government accepted new
"Temporary provisions on the transfer from the boundaries of Moscow to
the place of permanent registration those in violation of registration
regulations." The Moscow Internal Affairs Ministry will be responsible
for implementing the transfers.

As per the Moscow government's usual tactics, details about the new
provisions are lacking - both for the public and for the authorities
expected to enforce them. Members of the security services themselves
have stated that they have not been provided with clear instructions
on how to carry out this latest order. It is known however, that,
where possible, deportees will be expected to pay for their own
deportation. The administration claims that transfers will be
"voluntary," but what does voluntary mean if the alternative is
detention?

It is hard at this moment to state how many people have already been
expelled from the city. According to the newspaper Kommersant, the
authorities themselves are not certain. As to how many might be
affected in the days and weeks ahead, that too is difficult to
estimate. In addition to the 20,000 whose registration has so far been
refused, and using the government's estimate about the number of
"guests" who were expected to re-register - 120,000 - there are at
least several thousand more people at risk of deportation. However,
taking into account the more generally cited figure for non-registered
individuals in Moscow of between 1 and 2 million, the potential for
far more massive population transfers becomes very real.

The re-registration process and any ensuing transfers is illegal on a
number of counts. First, according to the 17 July 1995 Rules for
Registering Russian Citizens at the Place of Sojourn and of Permanent
Residence, once individuals have registered, they are not obliged to
re-register. 

Second, the Constitutional Court on 2 February 1998, in its wide
condemnation of registration practices, declared unconstitutional the
list of grounds for refusal of registration in the 1995 regulations;
therefore, there is no legal basis for refusing registration to those
who cannot "adequately explain their business" in the capital.

Third, the use of expulsion as a penalty for registration infractions
is not provided for in any piece of Russian legislation.

Luzhkov's measures have been condemned by Constitutional Court judge
Gaddis Gadzhiev, who stated that as there is no emergency regime in
place in the country, "any restrictions of citizens' rights and
freedom is intolerable." He has also stated that internal deportations
of citizens are completely illegal. The Federal MVD (of all
organizations) has also expressed reservations about the developments
in Moscow. According to the head of the MVD passport-visa service
Vladimir Krivtsov, registration or the lack thereof cannot be the
foundation for the restriction of rights of citizens; this is the
position of the country's Constitutional Court - a position that Mayor
Luzhkov has smugly flouted for some time.

The Moscow authorities have, in their inimitable way, responded to
criticism by simply stating that Moscow has the right to look after
its own security, which apparently means that niceties like federal
and constitutional law can be temporarily overlooked.

There have been numerous accusations - all-too-familiar from the past
few years - that during the re-registration process, police have been
abusive and threatening when doing identity checks, that the process
was carried out arbitrarily, that passport offices have abused their
authority by demanding fingerprints and placing on file detailed
descriptions of applicants and, as reported last week, that
individuals with valid registration have had their documents refused.
There are also reports filtering out of drugs having been planted on
some people having their documents searched, although these are
difficult to confirm. To date, 530 Chechens and Dagestanis in Moscow,
and 2,000 across the country, have been arrested on accusations of
illegal possession of drugs or ammunition; how many of these are
legitimate and how many are the result of police tampering is
impossible to determine.

To add to the confusion, private security firms are helping the police
patrol the capital, primarily by checking empty buildings and
generally keeping watch. However, although these forces do not have
the right to ask for documents, guards have admitted that they do in
fact do so. How these firms will be monitored, when monitoring of the
police themselves is so slip-shod, is anyone's guess.

Once again the Moscow government is employing confused, heavy-handed
tactics of questionable legality that serve to instil even deeper a
climate of impunity for authorities who abuse citizens of Russia and
the CIS. These types of abuses were bad enough when sanctions for
being in violation of an unconstitutional law were "limited" to
administrative harassment and the imposition of fines - legal or
otherwise. Now that expulsions are threatened, minority communities
are justifiably terrified that they will be sent back to the areas
they were often driven from in the first place because of dangerous
social and political unrest.

It has been reported that forces from the city's internal affairs
department plan to make visits to every apartment in the city under
the guise of security measures. In the first place, internal affairs
troops have absolutely no legal basis for visiting citizens' homes.
Second, at this point, it is hard to see any other motive behind the
move other than a desire to "clean up" the city once and for all. No
one for a moment believes that the 20,000 people who are awaiting
possible deportation have any connection to the recent bombings. Mayor
Luzhkov and the Moscow Duma are using the citizens' fears of terror to
implement emergency measures by the back door and through them, wreak
havoc in the lives of thousands of innocent citizens trying to live
peaceably in Moscow.

One final thought. As the bombing of Chechnya picks up speed and
Russian troops mass on the Chechen border, what is to become of the
non-registered (or de-registered) Chechens found in Moscow? One
possibility is that they will be kept in detention in the capital;
another is that they might actually be transferred into or dangerously
close to a war zone - one can only hope that even the Moscow
government would stop at such an egregious violation of human rights.

Susan Brazier is a Human Rights Researcher. She provided this piece to
Memorial Human Rights Centre, Moscow.
Memorial's web site is http://www.memo.ru


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