Chechen residents join campaign in defence of Kalyapin

Forty persons, who claimed at different times of being harassed by power agents, have signed an open letter in support of the Committee against Torture (CaT); there are nine residents of Chechnya among them.

The letter was sent on March 5 to the MPs of the State Duma, the Minister of Justice and the General Public Prosecutor of Russia.

The initiative to speak in support of the CaT belongs to the Association of Victims of Torture, which was established in Nizhny Novgorod after the Russian Ministry of Justice put the interregional public organization "Committee against Torture" (CaT) into the register of non-profit organizations (NPOs) acting as a foreign agent.

In their open letter, residents of Russia have expressed their outrage over the placement of the CaT into the registry of foreign agents.

"The CaT is nobody's 'agent'; it fulfils nobody's orders. Its activities are focused solely not on changing, but enforcing the norms that underlie the legal system of our country. It is evident that the Committee cannot effectively carry out its mission, when it is stigmatized with the shameful label... This means that we, as well as hundreds of other victims of tyranny will be left without defence," says the letter.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on December 5, 2014, Ramzan Kadyrov held a meeting, during which he stated that militants' relatives would be expelled from the republic, and their houses would be demolished. On December 9, 2014, head of the Committee against Torture Igor Kalyapin lodged requests to the heads of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office (GPO) and the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) demanding to examine these Kadyrov's statements. Igor Kalyapin had regarded that Kadyrov's words violated the presumption of innocence; and the measures declared by Kadyrov would break the law and violate citizens' rights.

Later, various incidents occurred in Chechnya with local rights defenders. On December 11, at a press conference in Moscow, unidentified hooligans threw eggs at Igor Kalyapin; on December 13, in Grozny, a fire burst out in the office of the Joint Monitoring Group; and on December 14, two lawyers of the Committee against Torture (CaT) were detained and soon released.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.