Human Rights in Russia

Five years ago Blinushov, Dzhibladze and I had an argument. Blinushov agreed with me. Dzhibladze was complaining that the human rights community was stewing in its own juice, our aims and our ideas were unintelligible to our citizens, they felt no need of us, we, surely, were working badly with them, we ought to reach out to the public. I said ‘Yury, you are either a politician or a human rights activist. If you want mass support, go into politics. Human rights activists will never have mass support. Yes, we support the rights of those who do not even recognize that they have those rights […] Human rights activists are doomed to a sad and solitary existence. It's like that everywhere. Even Amnesty International has never enjoyed majority support.

We can imagine the conversation continuing with Dzhibladze arguing in support of campaigns to influence politicians and legislation, Pustintsev in favour of strategies to educate those who implement the laws (the police and the judges), and Blinushov favouring local action to support vulnerable groups or political rights. While there were not hard and fast dividing lines between these activities, it is helpful to distinguish them. Furthermore, while enlightenment was believed by all to be important, taking up individual cases was an indisputable marker of an activist. Many, but not all, would have agreed with Grigory Shvedov, a young Memorial activist and editor of Caucasian Knot (whom we shall meet in Chapter 10), that ‘there are organizations which act as lobbyists, prepare methodological materials, or engage in enlightenment – I would not call them human rights activists if they do not give help to concrete individuals’. And there are those who on these grounds reject the term for themselves, for example, Sergei Lukashevsky, director of the Sakharov Centre.

I really do not consider myself to be a human rights activist because, to my mind, an activist is someone who takes up the case of actual individuals. I have never been involved with individuals. I have applied my intellectual abilities to benefiting either the history of human rights or current human rights activity.

Arseny Roginsky, and Irina Flige of St Petersburg Memorial, would agree with him. But all three would be thought of as members of the human rights community. Even among the ‘applied activists’, if we can call them that, few, I suspect, shared the view of Igor Kalyapin, from Nizhny Novgorod, that, if someone drew a gun on an individual whose case he was defending, he should stand between him and the assailant. In short, activists held different views on appropriate strategies, and how best to promote or defend rights. Some favoured local action, which could include working with law and order agencies; others advocated taking a particular issue nationwide, or to an international audience; others, one of whom was Dzhibladze, wanted to work in the policy making arena.

I thought that NGOs should learn how to influence the taking of decisions, in the political process, not in the sense of being involved in politics (today we are politically engaged) but then I thought in terms of legislation, of policy decisions, and public control […] So my idea was to create a Centre which would attempt to bring together the world of activists and the world of experts, on the one hand and, on the other, to change the activists so that they acquired the skills of analysis, of formulating their recommendations […] and then finding partners in society, the media, and so on so that they became – and this is the critical word – influential.

But what if the authorities are not interested in dialogue? In Grigory Shvedov's view:

I would not describe lobbying for legislation in our country as human rights activity. In another country it may be. In our country it's the labours of Sisyphus and an individual who is engaged in the labours of Sisyphus can command either respect, or a smile, but in no way would I call him a human rights defender.

And Pavel Chikov, a young lawyer from Kazan, when I ask him in 2011 whether he is interested in changing the legislation or in the way it is implemented, responds:

Implementation. Because the legislation is more or less all right. What's bad is that those who implement it – the judges, police – are so very dependent upon their superiors. It is a vertical hierarchy, in which instructions on how to implement a particular normative act are not made public, and a normative act can always be interpreted in different ways.

But if the problem was not so much one of legislation but rather its implementation, which were the best strategies to achieve this? Clearly, for the realization of rights, both legislation and implementation are important, while the appropriate response and strategy may vary from one policy area to another. The activist community changes tactics over the period, both as a consequence of its increasing professionalization, the entry of younger generations, a changing environment, and the shrinking of political opportunities. We find ourselves watching a flickering video of the way the state – its leaders, institutions, and courts on the one hand – and society – its organizations and citizens – responded to each other as the post-Soviet years progressed.

I focus on a few, very different, issues, all on the human rights agenda from the early nineties. Military conscription and/or the introduction of alternative civilian service, and the reform of the police, feature in this chapter. Public inspection of closed institutions (remand centres, prisons, etc.), the introduction of juvenile courts, the criminalization of domestic violence, and the rights of refugees and forced migrants follow, but in less detail. A more complete picture of the activists in action would include many more (remember the Extraordinary Congress of 2001) – those defending media freedoms, the environment, the indigenous people of the north, invalids, to name only a few – but those I focus on are sufficiently different for the reader to get a sense of the human rights community in action, the different strategies adopted, and factors that worked in their favour or against. The way demands are framed, the resources activists can draw upon, both skills and material resources, the choice of strategies, and of targets, and the critical importance of being able to take advantage of political opportunities all play a part.¹ At the same time, themes already raised reappear: the size of Russia and regional differences, the ways in which Western assistance could aid or distract, the influence of legacies of the past, including cultural practices, and of a changing domestic and international environment. The International Memorial Society, with which we began at the time of perestroika, comes back into the picture, before we move on to a new generation of young lawyers.

First, how did the policy-making environment change over the period? According to Tanya Lokshina:

When I started work [in 1998], despite the awful mess that existed there were specific individuals who were in the Duma, there were individuals in the president's administration, with whom one could and had to discuss things. If a great idea relating to a piece of legislation or how to implement it occurred to you, you knew which keys to press. Now, and it's a paradox, a professional community exists, in which numerous able, progressive young people work, good lawyers and analysts, who have very attractive ideas, but to whom should they take them? I mean at the federal level.

In the early nineties, by combining their efforts, elected deputies and human rights activists with access to the president or to key individuals pushed through legislation on compensation for the victims of Stalinist repression, on improvements to prison conditions, the freedom of the media, and non-governmental organizations. The signing of European conventions and legislation on an ombudsman followed shortly afterwards. By the beginning of the new century open political quarrelling had been replaced by negotiations between former and new party politicians and business leaders; bureaucratic ministries competed with each other and with the oligarchs for resources. Very few from the human rights community were deputies, or even members of political parties; a few still had allies among the deputies or even ministers. Some, as we saw at the Civic Forum, would have nothing to do with the political elite coalescing around Putin, while others favoured maintaining a dialogue with rulers, whether at federal or at local level. They wanted their proposals for reform to be heard and, if possible, translated into policy. Discussions, organized by individual ministries, where government representatives would meet with those from civic organizations, began to replace meetings with Duma deputies.

During Putin's second term as president, the Duma and the upper house, the Council of the Federation, with their memberships determined by the Kremlin, did little more than rubber stamp legislation presented to them. As the legislative bodies faded, and the regions were brought back under control by the federal authorities, the ministries reasserted themselves even more strongly. The Civic Chamber, the appointed and self-recruiting body of NGO representatives set up in 2005, gradually established itself, and its commissions sometimes commented critically on legislative proposals. But throughout the Putin and then the Medvedev presidencies, policy making retreated increasingly into the closed chambers of the president's administration and the prime minister's office, and few had access there. In 2011 Valentina Melnikova, of the Moscow Soldiers' Mothers Committee, suggested:

We don't know who the president's advisors are. A more closed structure than the administration does not exist. There's the head of the administration – Naryshkin, there's the well-known comrade Surkov, responsible for domestic politics – but who else? Who prepares instructions to be circulated, who reports on the current situation? Those who now hold posts under Medvedev are Putin's people […] and how decisions are reached, I do not know. And when I put the question to sociologists, they also admit that they don't know.

Igor Kalyapin echoed her words: ‘It's a mystery to me, how things are worked out up there […] nobody knows how and when and which decisions are taken by those at the top […] but it's clear to me that there are some people who try to steer things in the right direction.’

In 2003 Putin abolished the commission on human rights, headed by Kartashkin, and created in its place, in 2004, a Presidential Council on Human Rights, the members of which he appointed after consultation with Ella Pamfilova, the ex-politician, who was its chair. Several leading Moscow activists were included: Abramkin, Alekseeva, Auzan, Gannushkina, Orlov (for an initial period), Simonov and, from St Petersburg, Pustintsev. The twice-yearly meetings with Putin provided an opportunity for both sides to raise issues that they considered important – from legislative proposals on NGO activity or juvenile courts to developments in Chechnya, from cases of individuals being held in prison to ongoing harassment of activists. Under Medvedev, the council, now a Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights, grew in size (Dzhibladze and Gefter were included in 2009), met more frequently, and held some sessions in regional capitals. In 2010 Pamfilova resigned, tired of harassment by the Kremlin-sponsored youth movement, Ours, and was replaced by Mikhail Fedotov, a well-known and respected ‘liberal’ politician and ex-diplomat.

What opportunities, if any, did this policy-making environment offer to human rights organizations anxious to see legislative change? Not many, we suggest. It was a backbreaking struggle to get an item on the agenda, and its future progress was quite uncertain. With good reason the literature on social movements emphasizes the importance of gaining entry to the political field – through supporters in the political elite or a political party – if a movement's aims are to be realized. Over the period, points of entry for the human rights community dwindled but Dzhibladze was someone who, in the late nineties, believed it possible. From 1999 through to 2005, when the scope for NGO action began to shrink, Dzhibladze's Centre for Democracy and Human Rights was organizing training sessions, signature protests, preparing reports for international conferences or institutions, and seeking contacts with Duma deputies and ministry officials. Dzhibladze, himself an assistant to a Yabloko party deputy until 2003, became well known as a spokesman for the Russian human rights community at UN or European gatherings. One of the campaigns he participated in was that for alternative civilian service.

The Soldiers' Mothers Committees, which we met in Chapters 2 and 4, had focused since 1988 on illegal conscription (i.e. of those who should have been exempt), on defending those who absconded, on the treatment of conscripts and, as the Chechen war began, on stopping the sending of conscripts to fight in Chechnya. Their aim remained the ending of conscription and the introduction of a regular contract army. Dotted across the country, the committees had few resources except their members’ commitment. But by the late nineties they were becoming more professional. ‘You remember what we were like in 1993? Largely shrieks and tears […] and now we have learnt to work with the legislation – when I go to court, I take all the laws with me.’ (Liudmila Zinchenko from Chelyabinsk in 2001) And ten years later, according to Valentina Melnikova, leader of the Moscow committee with whom many of the regional committees worked:

The qualifications of those who work in our committees, and the correct way in which we advance our mission of introducing a professional army, gives us 100 per cent authority […] we are, in fact, defence lawyers […] we must translate the problems people face into a language government institutions understand, and present them with legal demands which they have to satisfy.

While assistance to individual conscripts or those threatened with conscription was their major preoccupation, the leading organizations would challenge new rulings. For example, a change in the wording from ‘he whose brother was killed or died while a conscript’ to ‘he whose brother died while executing his military duties’ no longer gave exemption if the brother had committed suicide. Parents who had lost one son were desperate not to lose another. And the figures were not negligible. For example, out of 251 boys who, in one year, did not return home in the Komi republic, 102 had committed suicide. The Minister of Defence issued annual figures on non-combat deaths which, annually, were in excess of a thousand.

The role of the Soldiers' Mothers was brought home to me by a visit to the committee in Omsk in 2000. I had written ahead to ask for a meeting. I arrived early at the small office in the corner of a dusty courtyard, an office shared with the Afghan veterans who, under their blind leader, were discussing NATO policy towards Bosnia. I asked for Tatyana Ivanovna.² After a while she appeared, tired, beckoned to me to sit down the other side of her desk, and asked ‘so which regiment is your son serving in?’ I was left speechless, choked. My heart lurched. For a moment it was one of my sons, who was serving as a conscript, and Tatyana Ivanovna was all that stood between him and the abuse he might face.

The Soldiers' Mothers wanted an end to conscription but, in the meantime, human rights groups had begun to argue for the introduction of alternative civilian service for those who, on religious or ethical grounds, objected to military service. This was specified in Article 59 of the constitution but there was no corresponding legislation. Judges could not adjudicate claims. By 2000 a campaign, ‘For a democratic civilian service’, supported by 50 different NGOs from 30 regions, was underway. Key issues were the length of service (conscription was for two years) – should civilian service be for two or more years, and who should supervise it?

Following the Civic Forum, there was an agreement that the General Staff would work together with the Coalition (as it was now called) to prepare a draft law. The secretariat of the Coalition included Moscow activists – Sergei Krivenko and Liudmila Vakhnina from Memorial, Dzhibladze – and activists from the regions, including from the Kaliningrad and St Petersburg Soldiers' Mothers committees. The secretariat had managed to establish good relations with the Ministry of Labour and this stood it in good stead when the General Staff began to refuse to engage in consultations. The Coalition got publicity, appealed to a deputy prime minister, and succeeded in having the drafting of the law officially transferred to the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Labour and to the Coalition. It was critical, in the campaigners’ view, that civilian service be supervised by the Ministry of Labour, not by the military.

The draft law received its first reading in April 2002, 300 amendments were proposed for its second reading. But suddenly the wind changed. The Minister of Labour was summoned by Putin. A new group of deputies was given the task of preparing the draft for the second reading, which introduced tougher conditions (four years of service) and, suddenly, at short notice the law was passed in mid-June. But employment remained the responsibility of the Ministry of Health and of Labour, the individual could live at home, was entitled to holidays and, with the shortening of military service (in 2008) to one year, alternative civilian service was cut to one year nine months. In 2011 90 per cent of the 879 applications for alternative service received approval.

Here we can talk of success, albeit partial. Without the campaign, which coincided with a favourable political moment (the emphasis on dialogue between ministries and civic organizations), and which attracted the attention of leading ministers, such a law would not have made its appearance. But we note how Putin's intervention influenced the outcome.

In the early nineties, there were military experts who had put forward proposals for a professional army but, over the next ten years, it fell to the Soldiers' Mothers to keep the issue alive. In this they were aided by journalists who regularly took up the topic of the draft, and the public opinion polls that suggested that, while the army still enjoyed quite high levels of trust, by the turn of the century the majority of those polled wanted to see reforms that would end both the poor conditions and the abuse the recruits suffered. Over 80 per cent of boys did not want to serve, and those who sympathized with them outweighed their critics. Majority opinion moved in favour of abolishing conscription.

In 2002–3 SPS, the small liberal party still with Duma deputies, presented proposals for a contract army, and in 2003 a federal programme was announced that proposed splitting the army into two parts – a contract part where all would be equivalent to officers, have decent pay, and civil rights, and a conscript part, which would be separate, only for education and for one year; upon completion the conscript could, if he wished, sign a contract. The border troops became contract troops and were transferred to the FSB, the security services.

Meanwhile Putin publicly recognized that draft offices did not always behave as they should. Thus emboldened, we might say, Sergei Krivenko, a member of Memorial's board, now leading the Coalition, joined forces with the London School of Economics, and a young administrator, Andrei Kuvshinov, originally from a Novosibirsk organization in the Coalition, to design a three-year project, Citizen and Army, and apply for funding to the European Commission. The successful grant application, subsequently extended for a further year (2006–10), and then for another four years to include other CIS countries was administered by the LSE. Perhaps 20 of the original Coalition members participated. The Moscow Soldiers' Mothers, under Melnikova, cooperated initially but soon distanced themselves, while some committees from the regions continued to work both with the Coalition and with Melnikova. Dzhibladze set up his own, different, project with Dutch funding.

Members of the Citizen and Army network continued to advise conscripts on their rights at consultation points; they collected data on infringements, and sent reports to the prosecutor's office and to government departments. They also now took up the issue of contracts.

Krivenko: With the aid of this project we managed to reach the highest levels, we had meetings with the Ministry of Defence, attended a roundtable which Lukin, the ombudsman organized, and Pamfilova's council. Our network Citizen and Army, became recognized, as was Melnikova's committee. The project helped us to become a socially significant actor – it gave us financial means and resources […]

Lukin is a fine individual but his office is pretty opaque. It was a major undertaking to get through to him, to get him to take up the issue, organize roundtables, write reports to the Ministry of Defence, get questions asked at meetings with the president. It was the same with Pamfilova. Last year [2010] we managed to organize a big event on military reform under the auspices of the [president's] council, and passed all the papers to the president.

M.: And what were the main achievements of the project, apart from those of getting recognition at a high level?

Krivenko: The provision of real assistance to concrete individuals: conscripts, soldiers, and those doing alternative service. We developed a network of organizations, right across the whole country, one which really worked for conscripts and soldiers. And on this basis we collected the data which we could present to the Ministry of Defence, and make recommendations.

Despite the Coalition, Melnikova, and Marchenko (from Mother's Right) all wishing to see an end to conscription, they work for this independently of one another. Veronika Marchenko, quite simply, prefers to work on a narrow issue, ‘dead soldiers’, and to do it her own way, which includes winning cases before the European Court, and using striking posters. (See plate 7) In Krivenko's view, Mother's Right ‘is a very good human rights organization but, quite simply, Veronika does not work with other organizations’. Relations between Melnikova and other organizations are more complicated. There is a difference in approach between Melnikova and the Coalition in that the battle cry of the Soldiers' Mothers committees ‘always was – “No conscription!” […] and when we write our reports and present them to the president, we don't give them a heading “Conscription is not needed! It should be ended!” which is what they want.’ Not, Krivenko argues, because the Coalition favours conscription but because a full frontal attack will get less support.

Melnikova's committee focuses on abuse within the army, and on taking up individual cases. She is sceptical of the achievement of allowing conscripts to have mobile phones: simply another opportunity for extortion by officers, as could happen with the new contract system. In one regiment in the Far East, conscripts were forced to sign up for contracts and, once they had signed, and began to receive pay, it was stolen from them through a deal done by officers with a criminal gang, which was allowed on to the base. Appeals began to trickle out to the Soldiers' Mothers but they were refused access to the base. They managed to persuade a Duma deputy, a general in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, ‘to use his right to have an audience with the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Minister of Defence’; the matter was investigated and those responsible brought to justice. But the introduction of contracts was, quite simply, a failure. The General Staff stole the money and falsified the figures. In 2007 Putin learnt of what was happening, tore strips off the assembled generals, sacked the Minister of Defence, and appointed Anatoly Serdiukov, a civilian from the Tax Authority, to sort it out the mess. According to Melnikova:

Serdiukov was in a state of shock, he did not try to hide the fact. The whole system of finances in the armed forces was so tangled that it was quite impossible to track where the money was going, and half was being stolen. And then he came under attack [from] generals who are still serving, and generals who have retired and hold some position or other and do not do anything […] it's simply corporate theft, a kind of metastasis in the system.

In 2008 Serdiukov was being accused by the army lobby of abandoning the officers, of destroying the army, and acting as an agent of imperialism. Melnikova and her colleagues sought Ella Pamfilova's advice, who arranged a meeting for them with Serdiukov and eight of his first deputies – ‘three of us were from Moscow, then there were our members from Sochi, Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod, 15 of us in all, those who were prepared to meet with the minister, those who think strategically […] and it became perfectly clear that our position was close to his’.

A smaller meeting with the chief of the General Staff followed, then with Putin, then Medvedev. But despite Medvedev's proposing a five-point plan to restructure and reform the armed forces, the move to a professional army still awaits resolution. The shrinking age cohort, and move to one-year service, has, according to the generals, left the army no option but to return to two–three years for conscription. However, according to Krivenko, ‘both the president and the prime minister want a professional army. They recognize that that's the way to solve the problem. The armed forces receive new equipment, the conscript barely masters it in a year, and leaves.’ But then, argues Melnikova, that is the issue to concentrate on, not legislation on alternative service. In her view, part of the problem (apart from corporate greed, and in 2012 Serdiukov himself was sacked for corruption) is the persistence of a ‘Soviet ideology’,

that we are surrounded by enemies, that the army must be large, that our borders are the longest and therefore we must have the biggest army, that we should not begrudge any expenditure, have a huge number of soldiers, everyone should serve. I've been hearing this since 1989.

Perhaps because the day before we met she had been at a meeting of the public council attached to the Ministry of Defence (one of those that was set up after the Civic Forum), where the issue of ethnic conflicts in the army had been the topic for discussion, she was anxious to talk about the still prevailing ‘Soviet’ type thinking.

In the Soviet army they used to refer to soldiers from Central Asia as bad soldiers, those from the Baltic republics as fascists, Azerbaijntsy were goodness knows what, Georgians were rich, but in fact all of them were poor […] And now, it began somewhere around 2000–1, those who retain that Soviet way of thinking argue that if we are fighting in the Caucasus, it is because they are enemies. And then they accuse soldiers from there of being aggressive […] there's a large number of different nationalities in the army – Tatars, Bashkirs, Karachaevsty, Cherkessy, Dagestany, Ingushi […] According to our Dagestan committee, half the boys are accused of aggressive crimes, and the other half are victimized by the officers, continually humiliated.

At the Ministry of Defence meeting she argued that encouraging officers to distinguish and characterize different nationalities produces the problem, and was supported by the military commissar from Dagestan,

I reminded the deputy minister of defence, who was there, that all the departments which deal with relations within the army are under his jurisdiction, and I requested that he should include instructions or rules to be included in all the officers’ training that they should change the way they speak, that they should adopt a language of unity. Complete silence followed. Ideologically for them that's an alien idea. They are used to differentiating on the basis of nationality.

According to Melnikova, conservatism and nostalgia for the past is ever present.

They continue to insist they must engage in ‘education’ […] and what Ida Kuklina [a member of Soldiers' Mothers and of the president's council] has described as ‘going forward while looking backwards’ continues. They can't any longer say that they are not in favour of reform but, all the same, they try to recreate the past. That's why there's such support for Stalin's greatness, why we hear that we won the Great Patriotic War, and when people begin to ask – at what cost – then they start shouting that we are against the victory […] it's not all embracing, but it's a constant theme. If I attend any conference I always find people who produce that Soviet rhetoric. Bolshevism is not dead yet.

However, in her view, not all is gloomy. And her comments illuminate both the policy-making process and the channels open to activists.

Military experts who in the early nineties supported the idea of a professional army and then fell silent recently have found their tongues again […] and the experts are our officers, comrades. Moreover Sergei Karaganov heads the group, and he is chair of that council on foreign security policy that was originally set up by the newspaper Nezavisimaya (Independent), and which includes a number of military experts […] and they have maintained a line to Putin, and that's all a great help because while you may criticize Melnikova, you will steer clear of Karaganov because you know he'll have an answer, he's a very educated man […] we use all the channels we can […] suddenly we hear that there's going to be some military conference or other, we haven't been invited, so we ring up and ask – how can you hold a conference without us?

So which bodies matter in Melnikova's view? The President's Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights, certainly, because not only are ‘the members well-known individuals but they represent organizations, they are well qualified, and the council is attached to the presidency, its function is to prepare proposals, or recommendations relating to concrete issues for the president’. She agrees that the Civic Chamber also includes some good individuals, and that, by being a member, it is easier to establish personal contacts with ministers or with the president's administration.

And does Lukin [the ombudsman] help you? I ask. Yes. He is much improved. When he was first appointed and made his first report on human rights in the armed forces, he wrote such a lot of nonsense, that we, of course, took him apart. But he has really improved.³

Talking to Melnikova brings out, very clearly, the way in which the Duma has faded as a policy-making body, and how personal relations, and meetings, with leading politicians and ministers are critical for getting items on the agenda or tackling individual cases. The issue of army reform also demonstrates that organizations find it difficult to cooperate with each other. The animosity (perhaps too strong a word) between Melnikova and Polyakova (the chair of the St Petersburg committee) that we came across in Chapter 3 is still present. Marchenko and Melnikova occupy offices opposite each other across the corridor but they do not cooperate. Krivenko, from Memorial and the Coalition, would bring them together if he could but Melnikova is highly critical of the ‘Memorial’ group ‘while relating very positively to Memorial's work on Stalinist repression and Chechnya’. Too many people, she says, take up themes on which they are not experts. And if we meet in five years’ time?

I think we shall have already shut down our organization, at least I hope so. I am terribly tired. And Russia won't survive another five years with its present army […] But much will depend upon the [new] six-year term of office for the president. The state machine moves faster under a four-year term […] but, in any event, human rights activity has become more effective. There are failures of course – as regards prisons, the police – but in principle people have learnt a lot, people have learnt to turn to human rights organizations and, sooner or later, you find someone who will help.

So what do we conclude here? The Coalition did seize a political opportunity, when it arose, and the law of alternative service is thanks to its efforts. By providing professional reports, its members have succeeded in keeping abuse of draftees on the political agenda, and they have helped individual soldiers. But without the Soldiers' Mothers one senses that the uncovering of abuses would remain largely hidden. Armies guard their own secrets. The army lobby comes out as still very strong. And the General Staff's misappropriation of budget funding suggests a president who, despite his KGB background, can either be hoodwinked or is simply unable to control corruption. Neither Putin nor Medvedev proved able to take the movement forward to a professional army but, surely before long, the demographic decline of the 18-year-old cohort will compel a change in policy.

According to Igor Kalyapin, the radical activist with entrepreneurial talent from Nizhny Novgorod, who now heads the NGO, Committee Against Torture:

It is not that the Kremlin wants to have a corrupt police force, policemen whom people fear and who may even kill them. It's a side effect of a system of rule which lacks any mechanism of accountability, or of political competition. The authorities would be happy to put [police behaviour] to rights, as long as it did not involve changing the basis of their power. And if there are activists who are working on it, who are not aiming to become the centre of some political activity, then why not work together with them?

As the new century progressed, the issues of police brutality, including the torture of suspects, and of corruption at all levels, increasingly appeared in the news and internet media. Shocking cases attracted attention. In 2009 a young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered large-scale tax fraud by criminal gangs and high ranking police officials, was arrested on charges of tax evasion. Held on remand for 11 months, subjected to abuse and refused medication, his death caused an international scandal. Abuse in the police stations, and bribery at all levels seemed endemic. Medvedev talked of reform, and in 2010 declared that a new law on the police was needed. But when the law was passed, in February 2011, the most significant change was a name change: the militsia became the politsia. In what can only have been a momentary mental aberration, Medvedev referred to the law as a historic document.

The police force is a federal agency, under the MVD. Throughout the later Soviet period, and the nineties, the issue of decentralizing everyday policing (partly funded by regional authorities) came up more than once but the law of 2011 retained the existing system while transferring all funding to the federal budget. As with much else, the ‘power vertical’, the dominance of the centre over the regions, remains the principle of state organization. However, as Brian Taylor points out in an illuminating article, the Russian police system shares much in common with other police systems: ‘The status quo has both a bureaucratic and cultural advantage, and is not only a communist tradition but a long-standing Russian one. It also is far from unique in comparative terms, including for large, multi-ethnic federations.’⁴ Similarly, the idea that the police's function is to serve the state rather than citizens, despite the wording in the new law which ‘states the police's responsibility to “defend the life, health, rights, and freedoms” of inhabitants of Russia (citizens or otherwise)’ is, he suggests, commonly found in authoritarian, middle income countries. Institutional rivalries – particularly between the MVD, prosecutors, and the security services – feature in both authoritarian and democratic systems. (At a seminar for Russian and American prosecutors in St Petersburg in 1998, their shared antipathies and suspicions, in particular of the security services, were apparent.) However, as Taylor demonstrates, two elements in the Russian environment have had a major influence on police behaviour since the ending of Communist-party rule. One, inherited from the past, from the Soviet ‘command economy’ type of rule, is the quota system, the setting of planned targets for police forces to meet. Here I quote Taylor:

A series of indicators were passed down from the center. The targets were often absurdly precise (a certain number of firearms arrests per month, a specific number of traffic violations, another target for passport infringements, etc.) as well as impossibly high (such as clearance rates over 90 per cent). […] As before, the quotas are often both very precise and completely unrealistic, and particularly divorced from local conditions. […] Often these indicators are set with respect to the previous year. So, for example, if in one small village the police were supposed to arrest three people for selling narcotics, the next year they might have to arrest four. What if all dealers in this small village are already in jail, and there is no one else left to arrest? In the best case this village police officer might make a deal with his boss to falsify the report, but it might also be necessary, for example, to coerce someone arrested for petty theft to plead guilty to drug trafficking.

And, as Taylor points out, once an officer has met his quota target, he can enrich himself. The new economic environment of wealthy individuals, struggling entrepreneurs, car drivers, and illegal migrant workers provides plenty of opportunities for poorly paid policemen. Kalyapin soon experienced the corruption.

Moreover [the law and order agencies] behaved quite unscrupulously. And they have become less and less controllable by anyone. As a result, instead of the development of a civilized state with a market economy, we have something pretty deformed and scary. Those who are in a position of power are not directly involved in economic matters, but they receive most of the profits, while escaping from any control by law, or by society.

In the Soviet period, the demands and interests of the Party–State took precedence over societal concerns, so law enforcement was predominately a repressive organization. That repressive component of behavior has lessened but persisted, while the predatory (economically self-interested) element has grown but is not entirely new. What remains the case is that protection of citizens is often a secondary or even tertiary concern of law enforcement personnel.

Given such a situation, what are the options open to human rights activists to effect changes in police behaviour? Perhaps not surprisingly, in the 1990s, while the human rights centres took up individual cases, there was no attempt to create a coalition to press for reforms. The task, I suggest, was simply too daunting – and, importantly, ideas on how to reform a police service, on what it should look like, what its tasks should be, were thin on the ground. The nineties too were a time of rising crime – robberies, muggings, murder – when the incompetence of the local police caused as much concern as their abusive practices. Over the period, changes within the police – more corruption, accompanied by abuse (there is no way we can assess whether police brutality rose or fell), and, by 2010, the increasing use of violence against demonstrators, brought a new level of concern. Changes within the human rights community – the emergence of a new generation of young lawyers, a more professional approach when advocating reforms – and changes in the Kremlin's attitude towards Western funders and to active opposition combined to produce a shift in tactics within the human rights community. Taking on the police began to replace working with the police.

Let us follow the path trodden by Citizens Watch in St Petersburg. In the 1990s, Boris Pustintsev, and some of the domestic violence crisis centres in St Petersburg and other cities, advocated working with the police to educate them.⁵ By the late nineties the crisis centres were running training programmes for serving police officers, and Citizens Watch had established good contacts with the city police authorities and with the MVD University. Activities included publishing and distributing European materials on police codes of conduct, organizing visits for police to observe practices in other countries, training sessions for recruits, and introducing a course on human rights and policing at the university. Pustintsev's view was, to change police behaviour, work had to be done at grassroots level, as well as at the top. After the Civic Forum in 2001, he was encouraged by the ‘dialogue’ that continued under the ministry but, as everywhere, much depended upon the relations that a human rights organization, or its leader, could establish with those in authority at regional level. Pustintsev worked tirelessly at this. Among my photographs are those where I and others stand respectfully beside Pustintsev and the regional police chief in police headquarters, or with the rector of the MVD University behind his huge untidy desk piled high with heaps of papers. But if those at the top decided such activities were not helpful or simply not needed, their subordinates concurred. And that is what happened in 2006.

Police projects, whether those of Citizens Watch, or a more ambitious programme, under Moscow's INDEM foundation, headed by Georgy Satarov, had been carried out with MVD approval. Satarov, one of Yeltin's assistants in 1994–7, is a well-known figure in Moscow political and intellectual circles. A member of the liberal establishment, his foundation engages in studies of, for example, corruption or judicial reform. Its website still refers to The Centre for Justice Assistance, a joint venture inspired by the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, and funded by Western money. This undertook a major project in Nizhny Novgorod, aimed at reducing time spent by those awaiting trial in remand centres, and another, called First Contact, where law students, in a select number of police stations, provided advice and took complaints from citizens. While both projects came up with results that showed how policing could be improved, and citizen satisfaction increased, once the Western funding finished, no attempt was made by the authorities to continue them or replicate them elsewhere.

It was the same with a project, organized by Citizens Watch, also with the Vera Institute of Justice, and with criminologists and statisticians in St Petersburg, which aimed to devise a way of assessing police precinct performance in the eyes of citizens. Surveys of public attitudes to the police had multiplied (which revealed low levels of trust but little else) but did not allow for precinct ranking. The project team struggled but a good workable survey instrument did emerge (one that identified encounters with the police both within and outside the respondent's precinct), and a precinct ranking that could be used by police authorities and community groups as a basis for action. Presented at an international seminar on police accountability, in the summer of 2001, organized by the Vera Institute together with Citizens Watch, it was welcomed by a community-policing official from the St Petersburg police department. The ranking of precincts tallied with the police assessments, and, he suggested, it would be helpful if the team could conduct surveys of encounters for particular groups: victims of domestic violence (a headache for the police), and ex-prisoners. Participants from other countries stressed the importance of including groups that fall outside surveys based on residence, and that may be particularly vulnerable: migrants, hostel residents.

For the first time it looked as though the police were responding but none of the city's top police officials attended the seminar, despite their promises to do so. And no further use was made of the survey instrument. But then, by this time, the regional leadership was expecting changes. In 2003 Rashid Nurgaliyev was moved from the security services to become the minister in charge of the MVD, a position he held until 2011, and changes followed at regional level. Citizens Watch, and INDEM, continued their projects but by 2006 a new law made it difficult, if not impossible, for state officials to participate in projects funded by Western foundations, and amendments to the NGO law⁶ brought organizations such as Citizens Watch under scrutiny from tax officials, Ministry of Justice officials, and almost certainly the FSB. With a new police chief, and new rector of the university, any projects that had Western funding were closed.

As an example of the way local officials might interpret the new tougher legislation on NGOs, Citizens Watch's experience can serve. In 2007 the new Federal Registry Service undertook an inspection (proverka) of its documents and financial accounts. It found three faults: a staff member had travelled abroad under a project where such travel was not included in the budget (despite the project's allowing for changes to be made in budget expenditure); Citizens Watch had invited individuals from outside St Petersburg to attend seminars whereas it was a ‘city’ organization (even though, if the proposed activity was ‘for the good of the city’, this was permissible); by distributing publications, funded by the British or the Dutch ministries of foreign affairs, they were engaging in PR on their behalf (with no regard to the content of the publications?). These findings were accompanied by a letter requesting Citizens Watch to provide all its correspondence for the past three years; its failure to do so would result in a charge of not complying with the inspection request, and hence closure. Its board, after heated discussion, voted four to three to comply with the request but simultaneously to challenge its legality in court. Among their board members was Yury Shmidt, one of Russia's best-known defence lawyers. They lost at the district court hearing, but an appeal to the city court was successful. Perhaps more interesting, when Pustintsev, at a meeting of the President's Council for the Advancement of Civil Society and Human Rights, mentioned the inspection to the deputy chair of the Federal Registry Service, he was accused of making the details up. However, when Pamfilova, the chair of the council, confirmed she had seen the documents, the deputy chair fell silent. Three weeks later the service was abolished, and registration handed to the Ministry of Justice.

By this time human rights organizations, of different kinds, were coming under investigation by the tax inspectorates. Elena Zhemkova, of the International Memorial Society, spent hours either preparing submissions, or sitting in tax inspectorate offices, while their lawyers challenged (and won) a series of court cases. The charges could be very imaginative: 20 elderly Gulag survivors, to each of whom the society had presented a Memorial mug at a commemoration ceremony in a provincial city, had not included this in their income tax returns […] Domestic violence crisis centres in some provincial cities received visits from the FSB, enquiring about their foreign funding. Among respondents to the survey of NGO activists in several cities, carried out by Denis Volkov, there were regional human rights activists who stated:

They are squeezing us again, pretty tightly. These checks by the prosecutor's office or the department of justice […] I think that it's the policy of the top leadership, the president, prime minister […] we had a visit from people from the security services, who checked us out […] earlier we never had anything like that.

At the present moment they are using both legal and other types of pressure: people are called in by the departments for the struggle against extremism, trade union accounts are blocked, tax inspections of a number of donors are suddenly instigated, and so on. Government agencies, of different kinds, clearly receive instructions from somewhere to use whatever means they can to block some action, to stop a strike or some kind of protest happening, to break up an organization, to scare people.⁷

Much depended upon the local environment. Some human rights organizations went under but the better established survived, while distracted by having to spend time and energy on preparing documents for the tax and justice ministries. At one point in 2009 the prosecutor's office in Moscow decided to get involved, and several – but not all – Moscow organizations received an unannounced visit from an official, requesting access to their files. This initially caused consternation […] but then nothing more was heard of the requests.

In 2013, as we shall see in Chapter 12, the inspection was more thorough and much more threatening. However, now back to the police.

Human dignity shall be protected by the state. Nothing may serve as a basis for its derogation. No one shall be subject to torture, violence or other severe or humiliating treatment or punishment. (Article 21, constitution)

By this time several human rights groups were actively engaged in taking up the cases of victims of police illegality or torture. The most visible among them were the Nizhny Novgorod Committee Against Torture, headed by Igor Kalyapin, which takes cases, and not only from Nizhny Novgorod; Agora from Kazan, headed by Pavel Chikov, whose network of lawyers in different parts of the country takes up cases involving civic activists; and Public Verdict, a Moscow-based organization, headed by Natalya Taubina, which also has a network of lawyers, takes up citizens’ cases, and engages in research and advocacy. All these organizations have won cases before the European Court.

Police abuse is the Committee Against Torture's primary concern. When Kalyapin joined the newly created Nizhny Novgorod Human Rights organization in 1993, his business interests occupied most of his attention. In the nineties these led to conflict with both the police and criminal gangs, and to such a degree that for a short while he moved with his family to a neighbouring region. By the turn of the century, having come to the conclusion that it was important to pursue one issue, and to pursue it professionally, he made human rights activity his main occupation, while continuing to survive as a small-scale entrepreneur. His aim is to demonstrate to people the importance of the values of freedom of speech, independent courts, ‘liberal values’, by taking up a concrete problem that is of popular concern. The issue he chose to focus on was the illegal use of violence by the law and order agencies. This led to his setting up the Committee Against Torture, linked to but independent of the Nizhny Novgorod Human Rights organization, and commissioning a study from sociologists in St Petersburg on the prevalence of police brutality and torture. The survey came up with the finding that one in five Russian citizens experiences such treatment at least once in their lives.

People have experienced this, either they themselves or their relatives have suffered, and they know about it. It's laughable to talk about human dignity or liberal values, human rights, in a country where representatives of the state behave in such a way towards their citizens. Freedom, I mean freedom from torture, which is listed in Article three of the European Convention, it's a freedom which everyone recognizes and the majority are prepared to defend. From this point of view, our activity, our committee's activities, resonate, they are intelligible to all.

For me it's the most effective way of explaining that if we want the police to operate, not in their own interests, but in ours, then we must control them. Don't entrust that control to the president, don't entrust it to United Russia, that won't work. We, citizens, must create some kind of mechanisms, learn to use them, and then we shall be able to control that agency.

This means demonstrating that ordinary citizens can pursue their rights if they learn how to do it. His organization aims to show people that any citizen, with some legal knowledge, can in the great majority of cases carry out his or her own investigation of an incident of police violence, collect the evidence, bring a criminal case against the police officer, get a criminal conviction and compensation for damages.

Between 2003 and 2011 the organization, now with a staff of more than 30, won 77 cases against police officers for torture. Perhaps half of these involved officers in Nizhny Novgorod, others were from regions or republics where the committee has set up its sections (Mari-El, Orenburg, Bashkortostan, Chechnya). In an emergency situation (a major incident involving several law and order agencies), they organize a ‘mobile group’, from among their lawyers, and from other human rights organizations, which flies in and works intensively there for a short period, before handing responsibility to two or three to conduct the case.

In contrast, Public Verdict, set up in Moscow in 2003, was a new venture in more senses than one. A group of Moscow activists that included Roginsky, Alekseeva, Lokshina, and Dzhibladze approached Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil magnate, for support for a new organization that, in Taubina's words, could provide

legal assistance, pay for a defence lawyer for individuals who wanted to bring a case against the law and order agencies for the infringement of their rights, in the first instance against the police, in some cases against the prison service, prosecutors, investigative agencies, and, rarely, the security services.

Leading defence lawyers, Genri Reznik and Yury Shmidt, and Tamara Morshakova (a retired judge from the Constitutional Court) participated in the discussion, as did board members from Khodorkovsky's foundation Open Russia.

In September 2003 Khodorkovsky invited Natalya Taubina, and Pavel Chikov, the young lawyer from Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan republic, for discussions (effectively interviews), and gave the go ahead, and one year's funding for the new organization, Public Verdict. Taubina became the director, Chikov the chief legal counsel and head of the legal department. Two months later Khodorkovsky was arrested on tax evasion charges. Public Verdict started its work in February 2004. It was the first serious, new, human rights organization to be funded with Russian money – and, sadly, so far the last. Until its closure in 2006, Open Russia continued to fund other smaller projects in the field, and Dmitry Zimin's Dynasty foundation has, for example, supported the Memorial Society. But Public Verdict was something new – designed and funded solely by Russian sources. It has established itself as a well-respected organization, with quite a high profile, but now, alas, almost wholly funded by Western sources.

Before we look at what it does, a word on its director and chief legal counsel. We have met Natalya Taubina before, the young assistant to Aleksei Smirnov in the crowded offices of the Research Centre on Human Rights who, in 1993, headed a small grants programme, and became known in the Moscow human rights community as a pleasant and capable administrator, knowledgeable in dealing with Western foundations. No one would be offended by her becoming director of the new organization – and this was important in a community where personal and political differences, and competitive personalities, are all too common. Younger, and perhaps older, activists refer to ‘the Taubina, Dzhibladze, Lokshina set’ – as experts at getting funding, dealing with Western funders and NGOs, and writing reports for international audiences – and they do, indeed, share a set of skills and years of working together on related projects, despite being very different. In 2011 Public Verdict was renting a spacious modern office in an office block built by the Turks, who have a penchant for marble staircases and shiny black surfaces. None of the human rights organizations could have imagined themselves in such a setting in the 1990s, and today it is only Public Verdict, the Memorial Society (with a new office, complete with lecture facilities, storage for its archive, library and museum, funded by Ford and Soros), and the Sakharov Centre (with its old but large building) that have a feeling of space. Overcrowding is still the norm, three, four individuals behind their loaded desks, in a small room, up the staircase of a shabby building.

Pavel Chikov is one of the leaders of the youngest generation of activists. Tall, energetic, self-assured, with a degree in international law from Kazan State University, he won a scholarship in 2000 to complete an MA in Public Administration at Dakota State. Upon returning to Kazan, and while working on a postgraduate thesis, he, together with six other young lawyers and a computer specialist, formed a group under the aegis of the Kazan Human Rights Centre, and spent the next two years simply studying different aspects of the system of law enforcement.

We carried out about 20 projects, that is we interviewed police officers, studied sentences – talked to 700 police officers, to 2,000 individuals who had been charged, studied 3,000 sentences […] We decided to study the law enforcement agencies because the friend with whom I started to work together was a former member of the crime squad of the department for organized crime. He was a serious policeman, with six years’ service. He was my fellow student, and he told me a lot about how bad things are in the police. And there wasn't a single organization among the human rights organizations which focused on law and order. And then we came to know Igor Kalyapin, from the Committee Against Torture, and he got us interested in what he was doing – public investigation of torture cases. And once we had finished the research aspect of our work, we began to take up cases, that was in 2002.

For a couple of years they participated in the Moscow Helsinki Group's regional monitoring project, while conducting cases, and by 2003 had won their first convictions of police officers for torture or murder. This brought him to Khodorkovsky's attention, and he left for Moscow but, before leaving, he and colleagues helped to create partner organizations in two or three other regions, organizations based on the Kazan model. Chikov spent two years in Moscow at Public Verdict. He organized the legal department and supervised the work of three lawyers.

I gave it everything I had, for a year and a half I was working 14 hours a day, it was so interesting, just imagine what it was like. When people from YUKOS [Khodorkovsky's company] came and said – we want you to set up 100 organizations across the country, modelled on the Kazan human rights centre, and you'll have as much money as you need. That was a challenge, and interesting, and I was 25 years old […] and I was to have absolute freedom to do it as I wished. Of course I knew, straightaway, that it was impossible to set up 100 organizations, and I said so – but they replied – set up as many as you think is objectively possible, that's what we want.

He pressed ahead, but his setting up of an association of regional partners made his position at Public Verdict difficult. He left, and by 2006 was back in Kazan. There he decided that Agora, their new organization, should focus on defending civic activists, not concentrate simply on police behaviour, although ‘if the police have beaten up an activist, it's a hundred to one that he will turn to us’. Chikov likes administration, likes being in charge, and draws from a well of energy and talent. While their paths and ways of working have since diverged, Chikov and Kalyapin see each other as close colleagues, and respect each other.

So, what does Public Verdict do – and what has it achieved? For a start, it provides legal assistance. There are three lawyers in the Moscow office, perhaps 20 in the regions who participate, and ten regional organizations who cooperate. When taking up a case of police abuse, they pay either one of their lawyers or a local lawyer to act as defence counsel. They provide psychological ‘rehabilitation’ where it is needed, and, with the client's agreement, publicize the case. In Taubina's words:

So that, on the one hand, the public becomes aware that you can fight against that kind of behaviour, and it is important to do so, because that's the only way we can change the situation. And, on the other hand, we try to attract the public's attention to the problem of the infringement of human rights by law-enforcement agencies.

By 2010 they had won 60 cases, and got convictions for 100 police officers. A hundred cases were ongoing; perhaps 50 new ones coming in each year, from maybe half the regions of Russia. They had taken a few to the European Court. They had no particular channels of communication with any of the law and order ministries but

from time to time we interact with them over some activities, organized by the president's council, or the Civic Chamber. We do have meetings, initiated by, for example, the department for relations with the public of the MVD, but when they suggest that, before we go to the press with cases of infringements, we should notify them, and they will punish the guilty parties, and issue a press release, we do not agree.

In some regions, their partner organizations work quite constructively with the regional police authorities, and organize seminars for prosecutors and criminal investigators. In 2010 they were heading a coalition working on police reform but, before we turn to this, a word from Kalyapin. He is ambivalent about the changes that Putin's system of vertical control have brought.

Surprising as it may seem, I would not say that today's authorities, the Putin regime (despite all my irritation and my unwillingness to recognize it) is a poorer defender of human rights than was the Yeltsin regime. I was involved in these issues then […] I can't say that human rights were better defended then, that the laws were more often observed than today – no, they were not better then, maybe even worse.

The near anarchy and corruption of the Yeltsin period have left their scars. But now, he argues:

there is a clear hierarchy of state officials, and that hierarchy is compelled to relate its activities to the laws. I am continually amazed by the fact that the corner stone or, more properly, the basic instrument with which we work is the courts. We object to the work of the investigative officer, who is in charge of a case of torture, before the court. More often than not we win these cases. About 70 per cent of our claims are granted by the court. That's the basic instrument with which we compel an investigating officer to do what he should, by law, be doing. Despite all that is said about corrupt judges, about how the system is fit for nothing – it actually works.

Does it work better than in the nineties? I ask.

Better. The court system works better than in the nineties. I can say that without any hesitation.

And how do you explain that?

Kalyapin's answer is that the seeds of judicial reform that were scattered in the early nineties, including by Sergei Pashin (who probably would not agree), have had some results in making judges act more independently. In Chapter 11 we take up the working of the court system from the perspective of the young lawyers who engage in human rights issues, and in Chapter 12 from that of the ombudsman. As we shall see, there are improvements but the verdict on significant improvements in court performance is still out.

In contrast, Kalyapin suggests, the MVD, prosecutors, and FSB are in the final stages of decay.

These structures have become some kind of a cancerous growth, which is eating away at the organism. They work for themselves, they don't work for the state, or on behalf of society, or of the country. For a long time they have been engaged in ‘self service’, each works for itself, and in so doing attacks the state. I am not even talking about society, I am talking about the state. They are destroying it. And since they have already swallowed so much of it, they are already beginning to bite each other. Today's pie isn't big enough for them. They don't get enough from the budget, so they are fighting over various corrupt territories from which they can feed.

And, do you think the political leadership is not aware of that? I ask.

I am absolutely convinced that it is aware of it. Simply, such a situation suits some in the elite […who think] the country is doomed to fall apart anyway, so the only thing I can do, as a highly placed government official, is to get something for myself and my children, who are studying somewhere in England, and for whom I've bought a property somewhere on the Spanish coast […] Others, one can say, try honestly to do something to salvage the situation, because from time to time some positive signals percolate down from the top.

Later in the interview, I ask: ‘Will the new law on the police bring no changes?’

No […] it's some clumsy attempt at rebranding, in today's jargon. It's a change of costume, very clumsily done, of no use whatsoever […] I doubt that there is a single person in Russia who is naïve enough to think that the police is somehow better than the militia. Why did they spend so much money on it? I don't know. Who is Mr Nurgaliev trying to deceive when he says that corruption and a lack of professionalism is a thing of the past? […] We, unlike Mr Nurgaliev, come into contact with the traffic police, with those on the street and in the police stations, and people see that the police have not got any better, only they are being paid more.

Public Verdict has a wider brief than either Agora or the Committee Against Torture. The commissioning of research, preparation of reports on particular issues, the maintenance of a comprehensive website, and of bringing out publications, all occupy its Moscow office staff. It is not surprising to find it, by 2010, heading a Working Group (Coalition) of Human Rights Organizations on Cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Promotion of Reform. Originally established in 2008, among its 14 members were many with whom we are familiar: Agora, the Committee Against Torture, Citizens Watch from St Petersburg, the Perm Centre for Civic Education, The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights from Krasnoyarsk (Gorelik), the Memorial Human Rights Commission from Syktyvkar (Sazhin), the Institute for Human Rights in Moscow (Gefter) and others. The Coalition or Working Group bears a resemblance to the Coalition for Alternative Service but there is a difference. Its member organizations are much better established, experienced, and work on a variety of issues. Some had worked together previously (in 2004) to produce a detailed report on human rights violations by law enforcement officials, based on data provided by local organizations. This began with the statement:

The police, as a general rule, act in violation of Articles 2, 3, 5, and 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Rome, 1950, hereinafter, the European Convention), namely, the right to life, prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the right to integrity of person in relation to deprivation of liberty, and the right to respect for private and family life and home.

The report was divided into sections ranging from ‘The use of physical and psychological violence during arrest, detention, and questioning of a suspect’, or ‘The unjustified use of firearms and physical force in arresting drivers for traffic offences’ to ‘The use of force, in the presence of police officers, by their former (resigned or removed from active duty) colleagues, or by police off duty’, to ‘Torture, and causing the death of the victim of police abuse’. Some of the cases are horrific.⁸

When, in 2010, Medvedev announced that a new law on the police was needed, the group sprang into action. Indeed Taubina would argue that it was through their efforts that police reform came onto the agenda, and that journalists in Moscow seek out Public Verdict for expertise and information. I suspect she is partly right but it is difficult, if not impossible, to weigh the contribution made by the NGOs and the impetus given to police reform by a case such as Magnitsky's, and the Krasnodar scandal mentioned in Chapter 4. The ability of the members of the Working Group to work together, and to prepare professional documents, showed how far the human rights organizations had come in the past ten years. What we might call the Lokshina, Dzhibladze, Taubina bequest had paid off. But the group did not include experts from within the police, nor from the MVD Institute. Satarov had managed to include them in his earlier projects but, now, it seemed, the activists were on their own.

On 19 March 2010 this plan was presented to a joint meeting of the working group, the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights, and the Civic Chamber's commission for public oversight of the activities and reform of law enforcement and the justice system. The plan's basic concepts were developed using the experience of similar reforms in a number of European countries. In April and May 2010 public discussions of the plan were organized in thirteen Russian regions in which hundreds of law enforcement officials, journalists, and representatives of political parties and NGOs took part.⁹

(But some suggested that law enforcement officials were largely absent.) From there the group moved on to consider the police in particular, to issue a response to the draft police law (when it appeared in August 2010), and to provide their alternative. Their main thesis, and concern, was that it made no sense to try to reform the police without the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and police relations with other agencies. (They did not say so but surely meant not only the prosecutors but also the FSB.) They expressed dismay that the draft bill simply ignored this issue. While welcoming the wording on ‘basic principles of police work: the priority of human rights, and an absolute prohibition on torture’, the group argued that:

The bill does not provide information about the future structure and composition of the police. It does not identify which other agencies, besides the police, form part of the ‘single, centralized system of federal executive authority that performs the functions of formulating and implementing government policy and normative and legal regulation in the field of internal affairs’.¹⁰

By October 2010 they were insisting that, while the authorities might have produced a new police bill:

It will be impossible in practice to transform the police into a professional institution that acts in the interest of the citizens, ensuring public order and public safety and fighting crime, unless a number of wide ranging and well thought out measures are drafted, adopted and implemented.

Public oversight of police activities, independent monitoring, a new system of evaluating police work, and investigation of cases of violations, they argued, were crucial.¹¹ But, and this is what we emphasize here, their advocacy had no effect whatsoever. They were voices calling in the wind, as far as Medvedev, the MVD, and the Duma were concerned. In February 2011 the bill was passed without any amendments. All that the Working Group could do was to state that it would monitor the consequences of introducing the new law, and propose amendments, and that its members wished to see a civilian appointed to head the police.

A year later in April 2012, following an appalling incident, in Kazan, of the torture of a suspect in police custody who subsequently died, Public Verdict approached the leadership of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (responsible for criminal investigations) with a proposal that a special department should be set up to investigate crimes committed by law enforcement officers. For example it should not be left to the law enforcement agencies themselves to investigate such cases. The chair of the committee agreed to look into this. One of the final sessions of the president's council under Medvedev was devoted to the issue of police reform. As Taubina reported, it had been scheduled and put off more than once. Representatives of the MVD, including the deputy minister, who sat throughout the six-hour meeting, came with their prepared statements, and the council's working group presented a draft proposal for discussion. The draft stated:

The reform of the Ministry of the Interior was of a predominantly internal departmental nature and non-governmental intervention was, in the main, purely formal. The predominantly formal nature of the non-governmental participation in this process has not helped increase the public's trust in the police.

The council produced a comprehensive list of recommendations (presumably prepared in advance), which was approved by a vote, and signed by Fedotov, the chair. It begins:

To create either under the president or the prime minister a working group to prepare a system of performance rating for police departments; to carry out pilot projects; to work out mechanisms for independent organizations to check citizens’ complaints against the police, taking foreign experience into account.

The list is a long one. In addition to items on budget transparency, complaint books, badges, telephone calls, computer data, it includes the proposal for public councils at ministerial and regional level which should have ‘real control functions’ and be ratified by the Civic Chambers. And it suggests that a law on ‘public control’ more generally is needed.¹² But there the matter rests.

In this case the activists’ campaign had no impact on legislation. It was clear that the political authorities could simply ignore this kind of pressure when they wished, and, what may have started as a Medvedev idea that something could be done, was quickly quashed by the vested interests of the law and order ministries.

Activists of some experience speak of how, at a certain point, you reach the ceiling of your potential [to change matters], you understand that you are dealing with the consequences of a problem but not with what is causing it, because that remains exclusively within the authorities’ jurisdiction. The level where government decisions are taken is today effectively closed to civic activists.

And that, according to Volkov, has had a demoralizing effect upon some of the activists.¹³

So what did they achieve here? They placed the issue on the public agenda, and they helped individuals. We have no examples of lasting local initiatives. The police are an institution similar to the army, one where the generals control the lower units but, unlike the army, their work with citizens means the cases of abuse are more visible. Clearly more than monitoring or public control is going to be needed to change police behaviour.