Russian forces routinely and illegally imprison, beat and torture civilians in the rebel republic of Chechnya, and the Russian government has made no concerted effort to investigate or prosecute the abuses, a human rights group said in a report released today. The report includes witness accounts of several deaths of prisoners from injuries inflicted during detention by Russian forces.
Torture occurs all the time in Russia, and if it's common in peacetime, it's more so in wartime.
Russia's special human rights representative for Chechnya, Vladimir A. Kalamanov, issued a statement Wednesday declining to comment on the report. Human Rights Watch said some of the abuses occurred in formal detention facilities such as the Chernokozovo filtration camp, where prisoners were forced to run or crawl a gantlet of guards who would beat them with clubs. Several former detainees described how soldiers forced a man with a head injury to run the gantlet, striking him on his wound until he collapsed. They just pulled him like a dust broom and just threw his body away, in front of us. It was useless even trying to bandage him.