INJUSTICE IN RUSSIA

If you click your mouse on the underlined words, you will get more information.

In this article, I will also write about the abuses of human rights and racism in Russia.

Experiencing injustice in everyday life is obviously inevitable and constitutes injustice in everyday life which constitutes a challenge in the basic  lives of millions of people worldwide.         

A few generations of injustice research has defined four groups of situations in which people can regard as being unjust. They include unequal distribution of outcomes, unfairness of procedures that determine outcomes, untrustworthy information, and disrespectful communication. Interestingly, cross-cultural research suggests that peoples’ evaluation of situations as just or unjust varies between cultures and depends on cultural values and strengths of social norms. Thus prior research has connected particularities of injustice perception with tightness, individualism and power distance which raises this  question,  is there a deliberate  structure of unjust situations in Russia?  I would be dishonest if I didn’t point out that deliberately or unintentionally, injustices and abuses of human rights also occur in all democratic nations.

 News had broken out in Russia that Russian police had placed a surveillance camera in the bedroom of Anastasiya Shevchenko who is a female activist currently facing criminal charges for involvement in an “undesirable” foreign organization. Were they the United States CIA or the UK’s MI6?  

Shevchenko’s daughter, who posted the news on social media, also said that her father’s apartment had been wired for nearly five months in 2018, prior to her initial arrest. Unbeknownst to Anastasiya, the police installed a hidden camera pointing at her bed. It’s unclear what police were trying to catch on film in Shevchenko’s home, but what is certain is they have grossly violated her privacy in an inappropriate and humiliating manner.

Was the camera pointed at her bed for the investigator’s sexual amusement?

The police surveillance warrant request said that Shevchenko could present a threat to Russia’s security and public order, alleging t her potential involvement in organizing mass unrest, extremism, incitement of violence against government officials, and involvement in an “undesirable organization.” Russian law criminalizes involvement in foreign organizations it has banned as “undesirable which includes all various nations’ investigative organizations such as America’s CIA and the UK’s MI6.   

        

Quite frankly I find it difficult to fault the Russian’s anti-spy organizations doing this since democratic nations do it also.

Case materials describing Shevchenko’s actions show the grotesque lengths Russian authorities are willing to go to use this law against Russian critics. They noted that she was a member of the banned Open Russia Civic movement and participated in events like debates in that capacity. The case states that on three occasions during the year, Shevchenko organized a workshop; spoke at a movement meeting about free legal aid, using social media, and participation in local elections; and finally attended a peaceful authorized protest, where she held a placard that read, “We’re tired of you.”

In my opinion and I am convinced that many people will agree with me that she didn’t do anything that would be considered in a democratic nation as being illegal or a danger to members of the  general public.   

And yet for these entirely peaceful exercises of free expression and assembly, Russian authorities filed criminal charges, used a senior investigator for especially important cases, and planted a hidden camera to record what happens in Shevchenko’s bedroom. And during court hearings, the prosecution continued to refer to her as a “threat to constitutional order” and “threat to national defense.”

If such charges were laid in democratic nation for the same reasons that the Russian authorities chose, the streets would be jammed by outraged citizens. 

Since 2000, 17 journalists have been killed in Russia in retaliation for their work. In only one case have the killers been convicted and, even there, the masterminds remain at large. Three other journalists were killed by crossfire during conflict situations in this decade. Russia is among the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, and it is also among the worst in solving crimes against the press.

Conditions have been consistently dangerous for the news media throughout the post-Soviet era. Research shows that Russia has been the world’s third deadliest nation for journalists not only in this decade, but since the birth of the Russian Federation. However,  data also show that targeted murders of reporters have climbed this decade, even as the Kremlin has centralized power and limited the influence of independent journalists. This report focuses on the period 2000-09 because it reflects the record of the current administration.

                 

The pattern of impunity in journalist killings contrasts sharply with Russian law enforcement’s stated record in solving murders among the general population. Law enforcement agencies are solving the vast majority of murders in recent years, as many as four out of five, Aleksandr Bastrykin, one of the nation’s top justice officials, said in a May 2009 interview with the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

An investigation, based on interviews with dozens of sources and the review of hundreds of pages of documents and news accounts, reveals systemic shortcomings that have thwarted justice in journalist killings.

The 17 victims worked in big cities and small towns across Russia. In the country’s capital, Moscow; in the industrial cities of Togliatti, Taganrog, and Tula; in tiny Reftinsky in the Urals; in warm Azov on the Don River; in the historic city of St. Petersburg; and in the volatile North Caucasus republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan. They were veterans who had earned international acclaim, and they were young reporters trying to cover injustice in local communities. The victims included reporters and editors, a publisher and an analyst, a cameraman and a photographer. Four of the 17 worked for a single newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, an intrepid Moscow publication that continues to produce critical coverage despite its terrible losses.

For all their differences, the victims shared one thing. They covered sensitive subjects in probing ways that threatened the powerful, from government officials to businesspeople, military to militants, law enforcement officers to criminal gang members.

In some cases, important evidence has been shielded from the public and the families. When Yuri Shchekochikhin’s family tried to learn more about his death, officials at the government-run clinic where the journalist was treated sealed the medical records. In other cases, agencies hand off responsibility for stalled investigations from one to another. CPJ’s inquiries in the Natalya Skryl case, for example, were passed among three offices, none of which responded substantively as of July.

Significant investigative gaps have marred several cases. Investigators did not question an alleged conspirator in Vladimir Yatsina’s abduction and killing even though the man was known to be living and attending school in Moscow. In the Eduard Markevich case, authorities detained a suspect almost immediately but allowed him to walk away while the case was shuffled between prosecutors. Vagif Kochetkov’s slaying was written off as a robbery by investigators who were uninterested in examining professional motives.

Police take the documents to "sell" them back to migrants. If they take a migrant to a police station, "buying back" the documents costs about four times as much, she told 24.kg in May.

Chupik described detention centres where Central Asian migrants are usually kept as "concentration camps. The person is put into a basement, a cubicle, a tiny cell, without any furniture, with vermin, without food or water or the chance to go to the toilet," she said. "They take their phones away  and hold them for days, so that the migrants want to ransom themselves.

Here is a shocking case in which Russian police neglect almost killed a diabetic Kyrgyz migrant worker.

Patrolmen detained the man as he left a pharmacy after purchasing insulin. Even though his documents were in order, they hauled him to the police station. They took away his insulin and threw him into a cell for a day and a half. He subsequently went into a diabetic coma.

Do you think that the police called paramedics? No they didn’t. They took the man outside and put him on a bench. Then they went to a court where the judge, without looking at the documents, stamped a decision to deport him.

The young man did not regain consciousness until the second day and he was in still in a critical condition,

The Police in Russia are the most corrupt agency in the country.  Nazism is cultivated in the police for the purpose of extracting corrupt income from their victims.

If a migrant is not a blue-eyed blond, particularly if his eyes have an Asian slant, a policeman will stop him. Law enforcement personnel do not have the right to detain migrants without cause but they do it anyway.

Studies monitoring migrants' rights in Russia have shown growing violence by law enforcement agencies and corruption appearing under the pretext of fighting extremism and terrorism.

The intimidation and raids directed by police against Central Asian migrants are done on a large-scale of violations of human rights and civil liberties in Russia.

The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious population in  the vast territories of the Russian Empire and at one time in Russia’s history,  it comprised of the largest population of Jews in the world.

Within Russia’s  territories.  the Jewish communities , primerly Ashkenazi  communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of anti-Semitic discriminatory policies and persecutions. The largest group among Russian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, but the community also includes a significant proportion of other non-Ashkenazi from other Jewish diaspora including Mountain Jews, Sephardic Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Bukharan Jews, and Georgian Jews.

The presence of Jewish people in the European part of Russia can be traced to the 7th–14th centuries CE. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Jewish population in Kiev, in present-day Ukraine, was restricted to a separate quarter. Evidence of the presence of Jewish people in Muscovite Russia is first documented in the chronicles of 1471. During the reign of Catherine II in the 18^th century, Jewish people were restricted to the Pale of Settlement within Russia, the territory where they could live or immigrate to. Alexander III escalated anti-Jewish policies. Beginning in the 1880s, waves of anti-Jewish pogroms swept across different regions of the empire for several decades. More than two million Jews fled Russia between 1880 and 1920, mostly to the United States and what is today the State of Israel.

Before 1917, there were 300,000 Zionists in Russia, while the main Jewish socialist organization, the Bund, had 33,000 members. Only 958 Jews had joined the Bolshevik Party before 1917.  Thousands joined after the Revolution. The chaotic years of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the Russian Civil War had created social disruption that led to anti-Semitism. Some 150,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1918–1922, 125,000 of them in Ukraine, 25,000 in Belarus.

The pogroms were mostly perpetrated by anti-communist forces and sometimes, Red Army units engaged in pogroms as well.  After a short period of confusion, the Soviets started executing individuals and even disbanding the army units whose men had attacked Jews. Although pogroms were still perpetrated after this occurs mainly by Ukrainian units of the Red Army during its retreat from Poland.  In 1920 in general, the Jews regarded the Red Army as the only force which was able and willing to defend them. The Russian Civil War pogroms shocked world Jewry and rallied many Jews to the Red Army and the Soviet regime, strengthening the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people.

In August 1919, the Soviet government arrested many rabbis, seized Jewish properties, including synagogues, and dissolved many Jewish communities. The Jewish section of the Communist Party labeled the use of the Hebrew language "reactionary" and "elitist" and the teaching of Hebrew was banned.^[17] Zionists were persecuted harshly, with Jewish communists leading the attacks on the Jews.

Following the civil war, however, the new Bolshevik government's policies produced a flourishing of secular Jewish culture in Belarus and western Ukraine in the 1920s. The Soviet government outlawed all expressions of anti-Semitism, with the public use of the ethnic slur жид ("Yid") being punished by up to one year of imprisonment,^[18] and tried to modernize the Jewish community by establishing 1,100 Yiddish-language schools, 40 Yiddish-language daily newspapers and by settling Jews on farms in Ukraine and Crimea; the number of Jews working in the industry had more than doubled between 1926 and 1931.^[13]:567 At the beginning of the 1930s, the Jews were 1.8 percent of the Soviet population but 12–15 percent of all university students.

In 1934 the Soviet state established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East, but the region never came to have a majority Jewish population.^[20] Today, the JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast^[21] and, outside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status.^[22]

The observance of the Sabbath was banned in 1929, foreshadowing the dissolution of the Communist Party's Yiddish-language Yevsektsia in 1930 and worse repression to come. Numerous Jews were victimized in Stalin's purges as "counterrevolutionaries" and "reactionary nationalists", although in the 1930s the Jews were underrepresented in the Gulag population.^[13]:567[23] The share of Jews in the Soviet ruling elite declined during the 1930s, but was still more than double their proportion in the general Soviet population. According to Israeli historian Benjamin Pinkus, "We can say that the Jews in the Soviet Union took over the privileged position, previously held by the Germans in tsarist Russia."

In the 1930s, many Jews held high rank in the Red Army High Command: Generals Iona Yakir, Yan Gamarnik, Yakov Smushkevich (Commander of the Soviet Air Forces) and Grigori Shtern (Commander-in-Chief in the war against Japan and Commander at the front in the Winter War). During World War Two, an estimated 500,000 soldiers in the Red Army were Jewish in which  about 200,000 were killed in battle. About 160,000 were decorated, and more than a hundred achieved the rank of Red Army general.^[25] Over 150 were designated Heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest award in the country.

More than two million Soviet Jews are believed to have died during the Holocaust in warfare and in Nazi-occupied territories.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many Soviet Jews took the opportunity of liberalized emigration policies, with more than half of the population leaving Russia and  most for Israel, and the West Germany, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

For many years during this period, Russia had a higher rate of immigration to Israel than any other country. Russia's Jewish population is still the third biggest in Europe, after France and United Kingdom. In November 2012, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, one of the world's biggest museums of Jewish history, opened in Moscow. Some have described a 'renaissance' in the Jewish community inside Russia since the beginning of the 2st   century,

Antisemitism is one of the most common expressions of xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia, even among some groups of politicians. Despite stipulations against fomenting hatred based on ethnic or religious grounds (Article 282 of Russian Federation Penal Code), In 2002, the number of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups in the republics of the former Soviet Union, lead Pravda to declare in 2002 that "Anti-Semitism is booming in Russia".^[104] In January 2005, a group of 15 Duma members demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned from Russia In 2005, 500 prominent Russians, including some 20 members of the nationalist Rodina party, demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient Jewish texts as "anti-Russian" and ban Judaism. An investigation was in fact launched, but halted after an international outcry.

Overall, in recent years, particularly since the early 2000s, levels of anti-Semitism in Russia have been low, and steadily decreasing. The government of Vladimir Putin takes a stand against antisemitism, although some political movements and groups in Russia are anti-Semitic.

Today, the Jewish population of Russia is shrinking due to small family sizes, and high rates of assimilation and intermarriage. This shrinkage has been slowed by some Russian-Jewish emigrants having returned from abroad, especially from Germany. The great majority of up to 90% of children born to a Jewish parent are the offspring of mixed marriages, and most Jews have only one or two children. The majority of Russian Jews live in the Moscow metropolitan area, with

After the passage of some anti-gay laws in Russia in 2013 and the incident with the "Pussy-riot" band in 2012 causing a growing criticism on the subject inside and outside Russia, a number of verbal anti-Semitic attacks were made against Russian gay activists by extremist leftists activists and anti-Semitic writers such as Israel Shamir who viewed the "Pussy-riot" incident as the war of Judaism on the Christian Orthodox church.

The Judiciary of Russia interprets and applies the law of Russia. It is defined under the Constitution and law with a hierarchical structure with the Constitutional Court, Supreme Court, and Supreme Court of Arbitration at the apex. The district courts are the primary criminal trial courts, and the regional courts are the primary appellate courts. The judiciary is governed by the All-Russian Congress of Judges and its Council of Judges, and its management is aided by the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court, the Judicial Qualification Collegia, the Ministry of Justice, and the various courts' chairpersons. And although there are many officers of the court, including jurors, the Prosecutor General remains the most powerful component of the Russian judicial system.

The judiciary faces many problems and a widespread lack of confidence but has also made much progress in recent times. There have been serious violations of the accepted separation of powers doctrine, systematic attempts to undermine jury trials, problems with access to justice, problems with court infrastructure, financial support, and corruption. But the judiciary has also seen a fairer and more efficient administration, a strengthening of the rule of law, moves towards a more adversarial system, and increased utilization of the justice system under Putin’s reign of Russia.

On June 30. 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the "propaganda of non traditional sexual relations to minors," thus opening a new, dark chapter in the history of gay rights in Russia. The law caps a period of ferocious activities by the Russian government aimed at limiting the rights of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people.

Propaganda is described as the act of distributing information among minors that 1) is aimed at the creating non-traditional sexual attitudes, 2) makes non-traditional sexual relations attractive, 3) equates the social value of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations, or 4) creates an interest in non-traditional sexual relations.

If you’re a Russian then  individuals engaging in such propaganda can be fined 4,000 to 5,000 rubles (120-150 USD), public officials are subject to fines of 40,000 to 50,000 rubles (1,200-1,500 USD), and registered organizations can be either fined (800,000-1,000,000 rubles or 24,000-30,000 USD) or sanctioned to stop operations for 90 days. If you engage in the said propaganda in the media or on the internet, the sliding scale of fines shifts: for individuals, 50,000 to 100,000 rubles; for public officials, 100,000 to 200,000 rubles, and for organizations, from one million rubles or a 90-day suspension.

Law enforcement authorities across Russia have dramatically escalated the nationwide persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the past 12 months. Human Rights Watch said.. One year after President Vladimir Putin said that the crackdown against them should be “looked into,” the numbers of house raids and people under criminal investigation have more than doubled, and 32 Jehovah’s Witnesses worshipers are behind bars for peacefully practicing their faith.

Russians per se don`t have the freedom that the people of  democratic nations enjoy. Perhaps. some day, they will enjoy that freedom the way we in democratic nations  have.