"Memorial": fabrication of criminal cases in progress in Chechnya

The number of kidnappings and extrajudicial executions has essentially decreased in Chechnya, but fabrication of criminal cases is on the rise. This is the topic of the 6th Report on Situation with Chechnya Residents in Russia of the HRC "Memorial", Network "Migration and Law" for the period from August 2006 to October 2007.

"At the background of an obvious and essential decrease in the number of kidnappings and arbitrary executions, another process is scaling up - fabrication of criminal cases, where the main pretext is the sincere confession of a suspect, named in Stalin's time the 'Tsarina of Proofs'," states the report of human rights activists.

According to the data of human rights defenders, published earlier, from May to August this year nine cases of kidnapping were registered in the Chechen Republic compared with 53 persons kidnapped during the same period of 2006.

The present document describes the mechanisms of fabrication of criminal cases, which reach tremendous scale. Especially endangered, according to human rights activists, are the residents who come back to Chechnya from abroad, those who are supposed to have relatively big sums of money, and applicants to the European Court for Human Rights.

Besides, the report marks that corruption in Chechnya has become a sort of unwritten law. The spread and volume thereof are monstrous even in comparison with the high level of corruption across the whole territory of Russia, human rights activists remark.