The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Moscow

From Russia's North Caucasus to the streets of Moscow, those who find themselves at odds with authorities can wind up as targets of deadly violence. So increasingly, some are working quietly or have abandoned their efforts altogether.

On Friday a new U.N. Human Rights Committee report on Russia called for a series of sweeping legal reforms, saying the country is still struggling to guarantee some of the most basic rights, including to a fair trial, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Meanwhile a spate of killings has forced Memorial, one of Russia's leading human rights organizations, and the crusading newspaper Novaya Gazeta, to pull out of the Russian region of Chechnya. Young people are now thinking twice before volunteering to work with rights groups, said Lev Ponomaryov, director of the group For Human Rights.

"It is marginalizing the human rights movement," Ponomaryov said.

The pullback by activists comes at a time when President Dmitry Medvedev has spoken out forcefully in the defense of the rule of law and democratic freedoms. But his critics say he has done little so far to back up his rhetoric.

Friday's U.N. report found that Russia still fails to protect journalists, activists, prison inmates and others from a wide range of abuses, including torture and murder.

The authors, an 18-member panel of independent experts, urged the Kremlin and parliament to make sweeping changes in the laws, including narrowing the current broad legal definitions of terrorism and extremism, decriminalizing defamation cases against journalists and granting people forced into psychiatric hospitals by the courts the right to appeal.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said Friday he hadn't seen the report and could not comment.

Perhaps the report's harshest criticism was aimed at the Russian justice system in Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus region.

The panel cited reports of torture, forced disappearance, arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killing in those area, allegedly committed by the military and security services, saying the perpetrators "appear to enjoy widespread impunity" from punishment for their actions.

While the report did not cite specific cases or statistics, it alluded to the unsolved killings of a number of journalists and human rights activists, including the October 2006 shooting of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a Kremlin foe who exposed widespread human-rights abuses and corruption in Chechnya.

In July of this year, Natalya Estemirova, who sometimes wrote for Politkovskaya's newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was kidnapped in front of her apartment building in the Chechen capital, Grozny, by four men. Her body was later found riddled with bullets in a field. There have been no arrests in the case.

Since Estemirova's killing, Novaya Gazeta does not feel it has the right to put anyone at risk by sending them to Chechnya, Sergei Sokolov, a deputy editor, told journalists recently.