Impunity Must be Fought
By Nina Ognianova Posted Mar 19 2010
A policeman’s boots are seen in the foreground as people lay flowers at the site in Moscow where human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburov had been gunned down the previous day.
AP Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko
On the way to our press conference at the Independent Press Center, Volodya, our driver takes a turn on Prechistenka Street in downtown Moscow. Candles, fresh flowers and the portraits of two handsome young people placed under a small arch remind passersby of the brutal crime that took place here eight months ago.
On Jan. 19 an assassin wearing dark clothing and a ski mask followed human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, 34, and reporter Anastasiya Baburova, 25, as they walked down Prechistenka, about a mile from the Kremlin. It was around 3 p.m., and the lawyer had just held a press conference denouncing the early prison release of a Russian army colonel convicted of murdering a Chechen girl. Baburova had covered the conference for Novaya Gazeta, an independent Moscow-based newspaper.
The assassin picked up the pace, approached the two and shot Markelov in the back of the head with a pistol fitted with a silencer. Baburova apparently tried to stop the killer as he strode past, which prompted him to shoot her as well, the business daily Kommersant reported, citing witnesses. Markelov died at the scene; Baburova a few hours later in a Moscow hospital.
Markelov was a lawyer for Novaya Gazeta. Baburova is one of five journalists the newspaper has lost to work-related murder in the past nine years. Photographs of the six now adorn a wall in Novaya’s main lobby: silent participants in editorial meetings that take place there at least twice a week. A sinister question hangs in the air—who will be next?
On Nov. 5, Russia’s Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor’s Office—the country’s top investigating agency—announced the arrest and indictment of two suspects in the murder, but gave little information about them or their motives. It remains unclear whether the gunman acted on his own or upon someone’s orders. Progress is sorely needed in this case to break the cycle of impunity in a string of journalist murders committed in Russia over the past decade. If the trend continues, the killings will continue, with devastating impact on press freedom, the rule of law and the public’s right to be informed.
The urgent need to reverse impunity prompted the Committee to Protect Journalists to travel to Moscow in September to launch our special report, Anatomy of Injustice. The report examines work-related journalist killings committed under Russia’s current leadership, scrutinizes authorities’ consistent inability to bring justice in the cases and maps out steps that must be taken to upset the status quo. While in Moscow we met with dozens of journalists and press freedom activists, as well as with relatives and colleagues of the victims. We presented our findings at a press conference and took them to Russian government officials directly responsible for solving the murders.
The record is staggering: 18* journalists have been killed in Russia in retaliation to their work since 2000, and only in one case have the killers been convicted. In all of them, the masterminds walk free.
The victims represent the breadth of Russian journalism: editors, reporters, photojournalists, columnists and a publisher. Some had earned international reputations; others were local reporters probing issues important to their communities. All were engaged in critical reporting that threatened powerful interests in government, business, law enforcement, or criminal groups.
CPJ research shows Russia to be the world’s third deadliest country for the press and the ninth worst in solving journalist murders. The impunity in journalism-related killings stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s stated record in solving murders among the general population. Aleksandr Bastrykin, who is one of the country’s top law enforcement officials as head of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor General’s Office, has said that the vast majority of murders have been solved in recent years. If indeed authorities are successful in tackling other crimes, why do they fail when it comes to journalist murders?
The failure to achieve justice in these cases can be traced to every stage of the process: political, investigative, prosecutorial and judicial.
The political climate is set by the Kremlin, where leaders seek to obstruct and marginalize critics. Probing journalists are effectively banned from the influential federal television channels and are pushed instead to limited-audience print and online publications. There they find themselves isolated, unprotected and undervalued; their enemies become emboldened to use violence, the ultimate form of censorship, with the confidence that they will get away with it.
An opaque law enforcement bureaucracy has made important decisions without offering public explanation or even informing victims’ families and legal representatives. Such a closed process prevents official accountability. In some instances, important evidence was shielded from the public and the families. In July of 2003, Novaya Gazeta’s deputy editor Yuri Shchekochikhin died of a rare dermatological condition that began while he was investigating high-level corruption. Officials at the government-run clinic where the journalist was treated sealed his medical records when his family tried to learn more about his death, and when the records were eventually procured by investigators, they somehow vanished in a Moscow prosecutor’s office.
In other cases, agencies hand off responsibility for stalled investigations from one to another. CPJ’s inquiries in the case of Natalya Skryl, a business reporter for the newspaper Nashe Vremya, were passed among three offices, none of which responded substantively. Skryl was covering the struggle for control of a metallurgical plant in Taganrog when an assailant bludgeoned her to death on a street near her home in March 2002.
Significant investigative gaps have marred several cases, with detectives failing to question relevant witnesses and potential key suspects, ignoring journalism as a potential murder motive and neglecting seemingly important evidence.
In the few times prosecutors have gone to court, cases have been untenable and, in at least one instance, bogus. Prosecutors in the murder trial of Anna Politkovskaya, the iconic Novaya Gazeta journalist, presented flawed and incomplete evidence to a skeptical jury, who acquitted three defendants in February. In the trial of Aleksei Sidorov, the second consecutive murdered editor of the muckraking newspaper Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye, authorities coerced a confession and falsified evidence against an innocent man; the defendant was acquitted in part to the high international attention the case received.
Questionable and unexplained judicial decisions plagued the case of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov, the founding editor of Forbes Russia, who was gunned down in Moscow in July 2004. A presiding judge in the trial of two defendants took no measures to protect jurors subjected to intimidation. A court later moved the retrial of the two suspects off the docket entirely and without disclosing the reasons or the person who made the decision.
Inherent conflicts of interest have compromised the independence of several investigations into journalist murders. Although Magomed Yevloyev, publisher of the independent North Caucasus Web site Ingushetiya, was shot in the custody of Ingushetia Interior Ministry officers, the investigation into his killing was left in the hands of local authorities. They swiftly sided with the shooter, nephew of Ingushetia’s then-interior minister, and declared Yevloyev’s death in August 2008 accidental. In the slaying of Maksim Maksimov, St. Petersburg authorities made no evident effort to follow up on allegations that local police may have been involved. Maksimov reported for the St. Petersburg weekly Gorod and was investigating reports of corruption in the local Interior Ministry branch. He disappeared after going to meet a source on June 29, 2004, and has since been declared dead.
Against the backdrop of such major flaws, the public at large has lost trust in the very state institutions mandated to protect it. But despite the evident despair, there are compelling incentives to correct the record for both Russia and the international community.
For Russia’s leaders, it is a matter of upholding national security and the rule of law. Both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have made commitments to protect their country’s stability, fight corruption and ensure the safety of all of their citizens. When 18 journalists are killed for asking tough questions and not a single case is fully solved, the government is failing at the job.
Some Russian officials have suggested the country’s impunity record is an internal matter and that the world should not meddle. But Russia’s partners in Europe and throughout the world have a deep and intrinsic interest. Deadly violence leads to widespread self-censorship among the press and leaves issues of international importance underreported or entirely uncovered. A nation that closes off its society raises doubts about its reliability as an international partner.
Russia is an influential player in numerous international organizations, but membership comes with obligations to respect internationally recognized human rights. When Russia does not honor those rights at home, it erodes them for everyone. The international community must remind Russia’s leaders of their responsibilities and seek results at every opportunity.
The challenge is daunting, but it can be overcome. CPJ research shows that the failures in the investigation and prosecution of these 18 journalist deaths stem from authorities’ reluctance or lack of political will—not their inability—to pursue cases to a successful end.
In the cases where conflicts of interest have hampered probes, new and independent investigators should be assigned and, where appropriate, cases should be transferred out of their current jurisdictions altogether. Rather than maintain walls of secrecy, authorities must choose transparency and accountability to restore citizens’ trust in state institutions. Officials should communicate regularly with relatives of the victims and allow them access to case files. Court proceedings should be open to the public. Cases that are technically open but dormant in practical terms must be reviewed: Unchecked leads should be pursued, missing suspects sought, witnesses and potential suspects tracked down and questioned. Where professional motives were dismissed without sufficient investigation, authorities should refocus their efforts on the victim’s journalism.
In Russia’s centralized law enforcement system, local prosecutors and investigators ultimately report to Moscow. This system demands that federal authorities exercise greater scrutiny over the activities of their local subordinates. The Prosecutor General’s Office, headed by Yuri Chaika, and the Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin, share practical responsibility for these 18 cases.
President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, as Russia’s top leaders, share a moral responsibility. They can start by condemning—publicly and unequivocally—all acts of violence against journalists, by allowing critical reporters to repopulate Russia’s public space and by demanding from law enforcement officials concrete results in solving crimes against the press. Doing so would promote a stable, just society for all Russians and demonstrate Moscow’s readiness to be an international leader.
These are some of the issues we brought up with Russian government officials, particularly from the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor General’s Office, when we met with them in Moscow in September. And though our meetings did not produce any breaking news, detectives agreed to meet again with CPJ in a year and give us a progress report on the cases discussed. We intend to hold them to their word.
*The tally may have increased. On Nov. 16, Olga Kotovskaya, a broadcast journalist in Kaliningrad fell to her death from a 14th-floor window in what authorities quickly termed a “suicide.” Colleagues and others close to the journalist, however, believe that Kotovskaya was murdered in relation to her work.