as a result of torture and human in human treatment is another horrible example also i cannot forget about political killings and political prisoners dia grossing human rights situation is most disturbing their professional activity or the publicly stand they were taking on behalf of on the political scale and similarly none of those mothers have been solved the very fact that these us nation have been never get told decline is the most concerned about because this case shows the most blatant violation of due process and human rights added thirty confiscation of property and cynical manipulation support which is the most powerful resource they have but for a country as ethnically and religiously diverse as the russian federation and especially for one that continues to grapple with the specific legacies of the soviet system what russians call pet to the survivals of the past that approach is at best incomplete and at worst a distortion of reality consequently i would like to welcome your invitation to speak more generally about the problems of human rights and the structural features because i have been working on those issues in the u s government and elsewhere for the last thirty five years and i would like to do three things in the time i have rather than focus on high profile cases try to go to some of the generic structural features that characterize the situation in the russian federation first i would like to discuss some of the specific ways in which ethnic and religious diversity have combined with the soviet inheritance to produce the problems and human rights that we see a second i want to consider this situation we got was specifically with regard to the north caucasus not because it is the worst place but rather because it is the one that is the most often discussed and third i would like to make three suggestions about the ways in which we in the west in particular in the united states can begin to change this situation there are some good models out there and i think we should follow them for a variety of reasons good and bad many people especially here in the united states have acted as if the events of one nine hundred ninety one put an end to the practice of the soviet union if the leaders and the people and people of the russian federation declared that everything is changed we have been all too prepared to agree even if it has been obvious that many things have been renamed rather than transformed and even if it was clear that what has gone before was continuing to play a role in defining the present as people there experience experience that there are many ways in which this is true but none are more clear than in the area of human rights the way in which ethnicity or nationality was structured by the state division of religious life into official and unofficial categories and the divide between the locus of real power in that country and the public face of state institutions that we label as a government when stalin created what was this to become the soviet union he manipulated ethnic identities in such a way to create tensions and therefore provide a justification for his authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian system to that and he and his system politicized ethnicity demanding that everyone identify along ethnic lines and that that was not to be changed second the territorial lies that linking up in a city to territory and control of land ensuring that there were always local minorities and creating a hierarchy that was invariably exploited by the center and third he treated some groups better than others guaranteeing hostility among them and ensuring that when the institution that dissed that it supported one hierarchy disappeared namely the commons part of the soviet union others would invert that hierarchy and punish those they felt had punished them since the soviet union since the end of the soviet union this system has not so much disappeared has been turned on its head ethnicity especially in the caucasus middle volga remains very much a politicised factor territorial arrangements are being challenged and what is missed important ethnic hierarchies are now upside down with those who were on top in the past pushed down and those who are on the bottom doing the pushing with regard to religion the situation is also one of a survival of the past the soviet raiment divided religious life in that country between official and unofficial categories in limited official presence which was possible where which was totally penetrated by the security organs and unofficial category which was more vital but which was also treated as fundamentally illegal instead of moving beyond that as all of us had hoped in one thousand nine hundred one the russian authorities since that time have simply reclassified what is official and unofficial now calling it traditional or hundred additional rather than official and unofficial but where the official is limited and controlled and the unofficial is vital is mistreated and persecuted leading to the consequence that people who try to practice their faith are mistreated and often because they are already treated as illegal becoming more illegal as a result we tend to blame the victims in these circumstances forgetting that they were their victimhood drove them in certain ways and the third division that continues to affect the status of human rights in the russian federation is a continuing split between the locus of real power in the political system and the nominal institutions of the state before nine hundred ninety one everyone knew that real power in that country resided in the communist party and its state institutions were decorative at best tragically hundred one that division has been maintained no longer between the communist party and the soviet state but between oligarchy clan interest within the political establishment of the powers that be and nominal state institutions that we like we talk about because we have no other alternative if one looks at the situation and human rights in north caucasus what one see is that all three of these continue to play a role official in the official ethnicity in the soviet sense survives with people trapped in definitions they do not except with her cash and being the classical example in hierarchies they reject be a dog a stock or with borders that are historical and wrong such and chechen politics opened and closed requires that people be allowed to define themselves any violation of them as we see there promotes violence and instability in short the people we often criticised for violence were driven there by the actions of the powers that be in moscow the official and unofficial religious division also remains with increasingly the russian government or russian powers that be insisting that any part of the official religious activity that does not is not controlled by the state is by definition violent and wrong driving increasing numbers of people who refuse to participate in official hierarchies in the violence and the thought but it is the third element that is perhaps the most distressing and dangerous and the one that we talk about least often and that is the continuing split between real power in the north caucasus and nominal power the political institutions that we talk about courts legislatures are not where real power resides their real power is behind the scenes and intel we are willing to grapple with that we are not going to be able to promote real change in that society but it is something that present we do not talk about obviously we need to do it many things but there are three that i would urge the first is we need to pay far more attention and put more people into the north caucuses and other parts of the russian far too often we rely on observations from moscow it is worth noting that it is farther from moscow to vladivostok that is from paris to durban south africa and we have a tendency to think that it's ok in the north caucasus and in the south caucasus worth's where i now live people say that you could cover jerusalem from damascus but it would be the wrong thing to do covering the north caucasus in the middle of all got from moscow is equally inappropriate we need to get people out far more and we need to have people of linguistic and cultural expertise second we need to make sure that in our focus on the human tragedies of individual cases we do not neglect the way in which they  reflect one of the things that happened in the sixty's and seventy's as more and more human rights information came out of the u s s r is that we were became aware of it being a problem being an individual tragically in the last fifteen years there's been a move back away from approaching the problem and treating individual cases which has the effect of allowing those who are most responsible namely the russian powers that be to continue to violate fundamental rights and third we need to follow the approach of the european court of human rights we always read in the american press about the court orders in compensation for russian officials violence against people what we do not pay attention to is something else and that is that the court invariably requires pacific changes and legal and political arrangements those need to be attended to they need to be the russian powers that be need to be held responsible for that and the united states it seems to me needs to at its voice to the european court in that regard and not simply in terms of paying compensation and thank you very much  thank you very much for inviting me today to tell you my story my story is a very personal story and a very heartbreaking story about corruption management company called hermitage and for many years i was the largest foreign investor in russia and one of the main planks of my investments was to uncover corruption in the companies that which we invested in we invested in a lot of the big russian state owned companies like gazprom trans nasser good nafta gatt and we were doing research into how the management of those companies steal money and then when the size of that research at the international media in two thousand and five after ten years of doing this i had become the largest foreign investor in russia and i had been making russia better place and as i was flying originated i thought this was a not unpleasant situation the russians you know they use a law that says that declare me a threat to national security as the reason for out about eighteen months later twenty five officers from the moscow tax police raided my office in moscow another twenty five officers raided the office of my law firm in moscow and they took away all the corporate documents that we used for our investment holding companies which we invested in at this point we didn't understand what they were up to and we went out and hired a number of lawyers including a young man named our name into his name the police also took documents to fraudulent we create about a billion dollars of backdated contracts and then those backdated contracts were used to get a billion dollars worth of fraudulent court judgments against our companies and then the court judgments were used by the people who stole our companies to apply for and get a two hundred thirty million dollar tax rebate of taxes that we had a couple years before awarded to them in one day so basically you have a criminal group which composed interior ministry officers judges  tax officials criminals all working together to steal two hundred thirty million dollars not from us but from the russian government our lawyer sergei magnitsky to figure this all out it took fourteen months of investigation for him to figure it out and when he did he helped us draft a criminal complaint which we filed with the russian general prosecutor in the russian state investigative committee and as soon as the complaint was filed instead of them investigating interior ministry the same people who would be involved the raid of our offices opened up criminal cases against all seven lawyers i asked all of the lawyers who work for me to leave the country for their own safety  these people are stolen from my country i'm not going to let them force me out and moreover i'm going to try to bring justice to the situation and survey then went to the russian state investigative committee and testified that the officers in the interior ministry were involved in stealing two hundred thirty million dollars from their own government provided documented evidence and sworn testimony one month after he testified the officers who he testified against arrested him in front of his wife and two children and put him in pretrial detention with a very specific purpose of getting him to withdraw his testimony against the police officers  absolutely wasn't going to withdraw his testimony and they also wanted him to plead guilty to a fabricated crime in order to justify the imprisonment he refused to do both and so they started to put even with all his clothes on they put him in cells with no toilet just a hole in the floor where sewage would bubble up and probably most damaging to him they confiscated  even after all this pressure he said no things got worse moving him from cell to cell and doing all sorts of other pressure tactics on him and after about six months of this his health started to seriously breakdown vomiting after every meal and he lost forty pounds and they finally sent him to the prison hospital where they diagnosed him as having goldstone's and pancreatitis and they said in one month's time we want to give you an operation we can give you an ultrasound and if we don't see any improvement we're going to operate to solve this problem goldstone compatriot serious problem but it's not a serious operation to fix rison which is a maximum security prison is probably the toughest prison in moscow and most importantly there was no medical facilities there at this point his health started to break down because of lack of medical attention he was in pain such extreme pain he couldn't my down had to bang on the door for hours to get attention when a doctor finally came they gave him aspirin and said you can get treated when you leave when you get released but not before things got worse and worse and worse worse and worse and worse he wrote he wrote twenty twenty different requests for medical attention he wrote to the head of the prison service he wrote to the head of the prison he wrote to the investigators wrote to the judges he wrote to the general prosecutor twenty different requests for medical attention every single one of them was declined things got worse and worse and on november sixteenth he wanted to critical condition it was only then that they allowed him to get medical treatment ina prison which has a hospital but instead of giving him medical treatment they put him into a straitjacket put him into an isolation cell for one hour and eighteen minutes until he was dead he died at the age of thirty seven leaving a wife and two children and a mother that he supported and he died an innocent man having been arrested for testifying against corrupt officials he was an extraordinary man in that he wrote down everything that happened to him in prison he was an extremely intelligent and articulate person and he wrote four hundred fifty complaints about every single violation when he was in the prison during the three hundred fifty eight days of detention and one of the most compelling of the documents he wro a forty page complaint to the general prosecutor which which i've highlighted with some of those examples i just gave you and we released that on the day of his death to the russian media and they wrote about it and this particular story touch russians like  no other story because it was part of the russian he was part of what was supposed to be the russian dream he wasn't an oligarchy he wasn't a religious activist he was a political activist reporting he was a tax lawyer who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had of had principles and when corruption stared him in the face he wanted to do something about it and so the people responded very the russian people responded very aggressively to this particular situation and there was  after after that and n g o s called the moscow prison oversight commission which has authority to go into the prisons went into the prisons where sergei was and didn't didn't investigate and determined that sergei had been tortured because he had testified against well it's pretty clear to me that justice is pretty hard to get in russia and so we're looking for justice in places outside of russia and one of the things which we've done i testified a year ago in front of the  the rule seventy five fifty a presidential proclamation that doesn't allow corrupt officials in their family families from entering the country to ban all sixty individuals from coming to the united states and having visas and if we can't get justice in russia the one thing we can do is not allow these people to come into our country and i would urge human rights commission to support senator cardin and his request to the state department banning these individuals from coming into the state department to initiate that process as well as one individual case in high profile cases where there are thousands and thousands of other cases just like the people who do these bad things president of the republic brought to this modus operandi was the ability to speak plainly and truthfully about human rights abuses in a way that russian government officials and the russian public could understand this commission is well positioned to call a sharper focus on and higher priority for these issues in the united states is ongoing process of dialogue with russia in russia's case one of the most important things america can do right now is to listen to what the russian people themselves are saying due to a number of circumstances freedom house has been systematically tracking for years that may be easier said than done freedom house produces a series of annual reports last week we released our freedom freedom of press freedom in the world survey  copies of that survey are available here for with you not surprisingly the russian government responded yesterday through prague cusanus of lies which is actually a higher degree of response than we've gotten in the past which generally indicates that we've we've hit a nerve other publications include freedom in the world survey this year our freedom in the world survey showed a continuing decline in russia's performance most significant there was the reality gap between president dmitri medvedev rhetoric and action it became more pronounced as two thousand and nine passed and our nations in transit survey which takes a more complex and detailed look at former soviet states did not have any good news for russia either russia continues to perform at rock bottom levels in terms of national democratic governance electoral processes civil society independent media local democratic governance judicial framework independence  the courts and corruption in each of our reports this regression has showed a steady decline over the last decade and over the last decade we've seen a trend in russia between acts of terror and the steady regression of democratic freedoms we've seen this trend in one nine hundred ninety nine with the apartment bombings which then led to increased state control over major television stations we saw in be n which which precipitated the end of elected governors in russia and wherever a major terrorist action occurs a reaction occurs in terms of the deprivation of democratic  democratic rights and human rights to the russian people the american committee for peace in the caucuses a freedom house project that tracks events in the five north caucasus republics of russia shows a direct correlation between acts of violence between militants and authorities increasing in a cyclical mutually reinforcing pattern this research also shows a heightened degree of coordination among militants in the various republics tracking back to the declaration of a trans caucasian emirate in two thousand and seven corruption is seen most powerfully in the number of cases that are brought to the european court of human rights for russians there is no alternative corruption and impunity play a clear role in the cycle as the demand for or islamic law can be seen is driven by the absence of any accountability in the legal system repressive though the imposition of islamic law may be in a secular country it is at least a legal system with clear rules and consequences for violating them while there may be a response against attacks on authorities through operations against militants there is no such response for attacks against civilians journalists or human rights defenders in the north caucasus this perceived lack of justice fuels the ideology of the mounting and increasingly coordinated insurgency throughout the region as russia plans to host the two thousand and fourteen winter olympic games near the city of sochi on territory that was itself the scene of genocide a century and a half ago it is difficult to imagine security in this dangerous corner of the federation improving without a significant shift in strategy from what we've seen over the last decade greater accountability by regional as well as federal authorities and responsiveness to the needs of the citizens in these republics should be cornerstones of such a strategy those russians who have stepped forward to call for greater protection of human rights of often paid a terrible price as we've heard today the bravery of human rights defenders like tatyana locked in on this panel does not allow the day they do not allow the daily threat of violence to stop their work yet these are the few for the many fear understandably has a deterrent effect against this grim background it's important t russian public has not been completely silent in the face of the effects of all talk receive corruption and a failure to protect yet the protests that have drawn thousands to the streets as a lot of all this talk in kaliningrad in recent months have not been stirred by outrage over human rights rather the demonstrators in each of these spontaneous protests across the country are speaking out against the deprivation of equally fundamental rights decent living conditions freedom from arbitrary regulations against motorists and fair taxation taken jointly these demonstrations were called the public anger in reaction to the failure of shock therapy in one thousand nine hundred ninety four when life savings were wiped out and the outrage manifest itself in the resurgence of the communist party and nearly unseated former president hundred six coincidentally it was also in this period that the first chechen war finds its roots when deprived of what they've come to know their rights russians will demand change even if the connection between a repressive political order and the widespread deprivation of human rights indeed the very civil liberties that caused the tragic death of sergei magnitsky is not immediate to the man on the street today what is clear is that all is not well in russian media repressions are just one way the current regime seeks to prevent russian citizens from connecting the dots between the widespread abuse of their rights and the deteriorating conditions in regions across the russian federation throughout its long tortured history of political change in russia has never come without violence as a highly educated and undeniably cultured people move forward in the twenty first century there is much that the friends of the russian people can do to help them release social and political pressure and counter this historic trend demonstrating that friendship in a way that is meaningful to any russian comes not only through constructive criticism but also by a collective will to stop accepting things the way they are simply because it appears that's the way they've always been in the case of russia and its deteriorating human civil and political rights the stakes are simply too high for seemingly pragmatic the russian people deserve better they're unlikely to strive for it without encouragement and support from beyond their borders the respect that the russian government craves abroad it's not to measure it with its actions at home the need for practical support of those russians with the courage and determination to push for change in an ever more orwellian environment has neither been recognized nor adequately funded by their friends abroad it is the man whose name this commission bears might remind our moral responsibility to recommit ourselves to helping russians defend their rights and to do better thank you very much  on the importance of solving journalists murder as part of ensuring the rule of law in russia international attention on the matter has also intensified with top u s officials the european parliament the un human rights killed for their work last year alone bringing to nineteen the work related slayings in russia this decade murder convictions have been won only in one of those cases and even there  annual impunity index which calculates the number of unsolved journalists martyrs as a percentage of population only those nations worldwide that have five or more unsolved cases were included in the index which exam in the year two thousand to two thousand and nine russia ranked ninth in last year's index but climbed to the in excess this year reflecting a rise of violence against the press particularly in the north caucasus out of the three latest victims to work for a single newspaper the independent nova gazette which by the way has lost a total of five journalists to work related murders this decade along the chechnya english a g a border her kidnappers pass through guarded checkpoints undetected concern has been mounting over a seeming lack of political will to solve as to meryl the murder regional leader  has given contradictory messages about his government's readiness to assist the investigation immediately after the murder and he condemned it and said that the perpetrators will be brought to justice but right after  radio interview calling for quote a woman who no one needs and quote instead of focusing his high offices efforts on helping to track down the murderers filed a defamation lawsuit against of the conflict including the separatist co work could have provided a number of parties with a motive to kill but can any independent investigation be conducted by a chechen authorities when its president says that no one needs the victim can anyone believe that local investigators really have the freedom to examine work related motives including estimator of us reporting on human rights abuses by the can anyone blame witnesses in the kidnapping for being too afraid to speak to investigators in this reality p p d and others have called on russia's prosecutor general's office and the several level investigative committee to assign the case to independent objective from outside the north caucasus region and require that those detect just regularly report to them and make those reports public but such progress reports are yet to come roughly goes like that brawl the promise to investigate marginalize the victim play down work related motives and dismiss the possibility of any official involvement recall that even if you pledged an investigation into the two thousand and six killings of novice at the journalist anna politkovskaya then present putting called her work in significant and said he could not imagine that anybody currently in office could come to the dia o rganizing such a brutal crime and quote last september we presented a detailed report on unsolved journalists murders to russia's investigative committee which is the agency directly that a lack of political will is at the core of impunity and that's fundamental steps must be taken to reverse the record of injustice cloaked investigations must be reopened investigations that are  but stalled in practical terms ought to be restarted in the cases where a conflict of interest has hampered the investigation new and independent detective must be assigned and we are probably at cases should be transferred out of their current jurisdiction entirely cases are brought to trial the proceedings must be made open to the public and to the media to ensure their trust parents see and independent under russia's centralized  enforcement system federal officials in moscow have the ultimate responsibility for solving the journalist's murders they must demand specific progress reports from their subordinates at their district and ridge regional levels russia's top leaders president medvedev and prime minister share the moral responsibility for russia's impunity record they must hold their appointees accountable for progress in these killings some russian officials have suggested that the country's record of impunity is an internal matter and that the world should not meddle but russian partners in the united states in europe and elsewhere in the world have a deep and intrinsic interest in having this record corrected deadly violence leads to pervasive self censorship among the journalists which leaves issues of international importance under reported or entirely uncovered the world must not leave it up to the killers to decide what stories out of russia can be read in or heard commend the tom lantos human rights commission for holding this important hearing and encourages the commission to continue hearings on press freedom on  on journalists and on impunity in russia in the future we recommend that the commission share today's testimony all of these testimonies for today with president barack obama and members of the executive branch and we  leaders actively engage with their russian counterparts on this pressing issue whatever relevance u s leaders ought to offer assistance and cooperation to their russian counterparts in combating impunity and closing i'd like to alert the members of the commission to a worrisome legal development for press freedom in russia the introduction in the state of the bill broadening the rights of the federal security service or the f s b on april twenty fourth the russian government submitted to parliament amendments the country's administrative code and the law on f s b of t v it is which would give the security agency the right to summon journalists for questioning and demand that editors remove articles that quote aid extremists or appear undesirable and the quote from their publication of the proposed amendments introduced penalties for those cannot comply that range from monetary fines to a five day detention but equally disturbing in the proposal is an explanatory note which plains georgia media outlet for the rise of extremist activities in russia this no and the mistrust and the ability of the state to defend its citizens thus practically involving be used any extremist activities if passed this broad amendment would give the same broad censorship tragic story and one of these we've been trying to figure out is how do you influence governments and how do you have an impact and you know i think we will do letters and we do public press conferences  violations at a minimum should not be allowed to travel to the united states and other countries do the same thing and we should figure out a way to make sure that their assets are frozen people who commit murder and that's what happened in that case should not have a right to travel here and invest in business here and make money here and there should be consequences we can't get the consequence to happen in russia well then maybe there's something we can who like to torture people and i do it on tape and so there are tapes of him torturing not one but several people and we have we have asked you know saying i appreciate the test or this was an excellent panel i've learned an awful lot here today we're going to spread this information around we're going to work with you mr broader on legislation and a lot of will do both and you know i again thank you so much for coming it's great to