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Letter from Human Rights Watch to U.S. President Bill Clinton

August 18, 1998
President William Jefferson Clinton
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D. C.

Dear President Clinton,

In light of your upcoming trip to Russia, we take this opportunity to share with you our concerns in that country. The issues we outline below--corruption and its links to human rights, violence against women, and Russian foreign policy toward abusive governments--should be raised during your visit to Moscow because they directly affect the rights of millions of people, in Russia and beyond, and because they are very clearly linked to U.S. policy interests in areas beyond human rights.

1.Corruption
We urge you to send a message to the Russian government and the Russian people that the U.S. government deplores the debilitating effects corruption has had on the Russian economy and on the rule of law. The Russian government is riddled with corruption, and its current difficulties, including, for example, chronic wage and pension arrears, insider privatization deals and tax evasion, are often a consequence of corruption. Moreover, it has laid waste to the public institutions crucial to long-term economic development, the rule of law and human rights protection. Finally, it is difficult to overstate how thoroughly corruption has eroded public trust in these institutions.

Among the most corrupt government institutions in Russia are its law enforcement agencies; this is no doubt of grave concern to the Clinton administration because it sabotages U.S. policy goals in fighting international crime. Corruption in law enforcement agencies also facilitates or is directly responsible for human rights abuses: ill-treatment and abuse in police custody, trafficking of women and police harassment of refugees and ethnic minorities.

Throughout the past year, Human Rights Watch has researched police abuse in four Russian regions--Irkutsk, Arkhangelsk, Nizhniy Novgorod, and Ekatarinburg, in addition to Moscow and St. Petersburg. We found incontrovertible evidence in most places that police routinely torture or ill-treat criminal suspects, defendants and even witnesses (including juveniles) to compel testimony or a confession. Police are frequently more preoccupied with generating income through corruption than with criminal investigations, the quality of which is generally unacceptably poor. Criminal justice officials (police, prosecutors, and judges at local and regional levels) commonly solicit and accept bribes to drop charges and investigations, yet crime solving rates are higher than ever, no doubt due to torture and inventive falsification of crime statistics. Finally, corruption's rampancy in the Russian police has helped to foster the atmosphere of impunity that prevents abusive police from being brought to justice.

Most commonly, police detectives beat criminal suspects in police stations in the earliest hours of custody. Other forms of torture include repeated suffocation with a simple plastic bag or gas mask. The suspect is effectively isolated from his family, and is routinely denied access to a lawyer. A confession by a torture victim practically guarantees a guilty verdict, as courts systematically ignore torture complaints and often base their verdicts primarily on confessions. Abusers are rarely brought to justice, as procuracy inquiries into police abuse are pro forma at best, and, without the approval of the case investigator, defense attorneys cannot order forensic testing for their clients to confirm torture allegations.

Corrupt policing in Moscow seriously violates the rights of ethnic minorities. In the enclosed report, Moscow: Open Season, Closed City, we document the predatory conduct of Moscow police in its enforcement of the propiska system. Police in the capital routinely detain people on residence permit checks and extort bribes from them. Such abuse is often accompanied by physical violence, and the alarmingly frequent invasion of privacy: according to police statistics, 1.3 million passport checks were conducted in private home in the first five months of 1997; in many cases that Human Rights Watch documented, police enter the apartments forcibly. In neighborhoods with large refugee populations, police extort bribes from destitute asylum seekers on a monthly basis, amounting to an informal tax. Their victims in many cases are people with dark skin who seek refuge in Russia, usually from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and some African countries.

Corruption is directly linked to the trafficking of women. The Clinton administration announced on March 11 a firm commitment to fight the scourge of trafficking worldwide. The administration must now turn its attention to trafficking out of and through the Russian Federation. Trafficking cannot be eliminated solely through the adoption of new laws and support of grass-roots NGOs; the Russian government must also make a commitment to ending the corruption which surely allows trafficking to flourish. According to media reports, traffickers allegedly rely on corrupt officials in various ministries to issue bogus passports, visas, and other documents. To date, the Russian government has not come forward with any initiatives to fight trafficking.

We urge you to make clear that such abuse by law enforcement agencies and the corruption that facilitates it sabotage U.S. policy aimed at building the rule of law and protecting rights. In 1997, the U.S. government funded more than sixty law enforcement training programs; the Russian government should be on notice that such programs will not serve to support corruption and abuse. Furthermore, the U.S. government should register alarm at the viscous blend of racism and corruption in the enforcement of residence permits, and should make clear that it is inconsistent with the purpose of U.S. funds targeting Russian migration programs.

2. Violence against women.
In our recent report, Too Little, Too Late: State Response to Violence Against Women , Human Rights Watch documented the Russian government's systematic failure to respond to violence against women. Widespread police refusal to take reports and state failure to prosecute cases in the face of rampant rape and domestic violence constitute serious human rights violations. Our research revealed that police and prosecutors routinely reject or discourage complaints, suggesting that female complainants either provoked or fabricated attacks. In the rare cases in which rape reports are investigated, women are subjected to highly invasive and seemingly irrelevant broad inquiries into their psychological state, reputations and sexual histories.

Remedying this situation demands political will to implement better policing and to adopt better criminal and criminal procedure laws. Pressure must be felt at the highest political levels in order to overcome tremendous resistance and stubborn prejudices.

The Clinton administration has long emphasized that violence against women is a priority issue. Congress has mandated spending of up to $1.5 million in 1998 for law enforcement training programs focused on domestic violence in the Russian Federation. However, without overall policy change, these efforts will be for naught. High-level Russian government officials must make public statements condemning all forms of violence against women and pledging equal justice for victims of these human rights abuses. The Procurator General and the Minister of Internal Affairs must enact directives mandating that police and prosecutors make the investigation and prosecution of violence against women, in all its forms, a priority.

In the fall of this year, the State Department plans to hold a conference on domestic violence in Moscow. This conference provides an excellent opportunity for the Russian government to announce initiatives to fight violence against women. In order to set the stage for the upcoming conference, as well as to support the growing grass-roots violence-against-women movement in Russia, Human Rights Watch urges that violence against women be raised at the summit as a serious, on-going human rights violation. President Clinton should seek assurances from President Yeltsin that Procurator General Yuri Skuratov and Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Stepashin will send their deputies to the conference. Further, President Clinton should urge the Russian government to implement domestic violence and rape training programs for police and prosecutors, and discipline officers who refuse to take reports from victims of violence.

3. Russian foreign policy.
Russia is perhaps the only member of the international community with key leverage over Belarus and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose leaders have created human rights disasters in their respective countries.

Russia has largely failed to use this leverage at crucial moments to stop Belarus's return to Soviet-era authoritarian practices. Considering the Clinton administration's stated commitment to improving human rights in Belarus, it must, in this summit, press the Yeltsin administration to make the most of this leverage.

The eviction of the U.S. and E.U. ambassadors from their residences in Minsk illustrated President Alexander Lukashenka's authoritarian style, just as human rights violations in Belarus since 1996 have clearly born his personal stamp. President Lukashenka's presidential decrees have flagrantly violated freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to due process. Our July report, Turning back the Clock , which we enclose, describes these and secret presidential instructions that seek to choke off information to the independent media. His political enemies have been subject to criminal prosecution; government security agents have clearly been involved in assaults and threats against politically independent persons, including an opposition newspaper editor, a human rights activist, and a film director. Since President Lukashenka is involved in the appointment of judges and can dismiss them, court hearings for his political enemies are unlikely to be fair, and anti-government demonstrators, graffiti writers and other political activists charged with misdemeanors are rubber stamps that generally result in jail terms and exorbitant fines. We hope that you will use the summit as a forum to call on the President Yeltsin to support the OSCE mission in Minsk and to engage the Belarusian government and President Lukashenka personally to respect fundamental principles of democracy and human rights as stipulated in the Russia-Belarus Union Charter.

Russian foreign policy toward the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia should also be a high priority for the summit. Russian cooperation with the U.S. and other members of the Contact Group and Security Council is critical to solving the escalating crisis in Kosovo. As in Belarus, Russia enjoys important political, economic, and historic ties to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that give it special leverage with the Serbs. Russia's reticence to use this leverage to help bring an end to mounting human rights and humanitarian law violations is inexcusable. Since late February, discord within the international community, in particular between Russia and other key players, has given Slobodan Milosevic the green light to pursue a brutal crackdown resulting in serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. A lack of cooperation with Russia must not get in the way of effective condemnation of abuses, enforcement of economic and military sanctions, or pursuit of other means necessary to end the conflict. In this regard, we welcome the recent collaborative efforts of the U.S. and Russian governments at shuttle diplomacy and monitoring conditions on the ground, and we urge you to make certain that Kosovo figures prominently in the summit agenda. Moreover, we believe that you should take the opportunity, jointly with President Yeltsin, to publicly condemn violations of international humanitarian law committed in Kosovo, vow to hold accountable those responsible for any such abuses, and commit to bringing the hostilities to a swift end.

We thank you for your attention to these concerns and wish you a productive summit.

Yours sincerely,

Holly Cartner
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch, Europe and Central Asia Division