Open letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour

*In June, 2007, at a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting, the Representative of the Russian Federation to the U.N. Office at Geneva subjected to severe criticism the report and recommendations of Mr. Doudou Diène, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The report was published in June, 2007, and was based on the materials gathered during Mr. Diène's visit to Russia.

Since the Rapporteur's conclusions were to a great extent based on the information provided by NGOs, several NGO representatives considered it necessary to come up with an open letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which we publish below. A similar open letter was sent also to the Rapporteur*.

Dear Ms. Arbour,

As representatives of non-governmental human rights organizations engaged in combating racism, discrimination and xenophobia, we feel obliged to strongly support the report and recommendations of Mr. Doudou Diène, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, devoted to the Russian Federation and presented on 11 June 2007 at the Fifth Session of the UN Human Rights Council in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution No. 60/251 from 15 March 2006.

Mr. Diène visited the Russian Federation in June 2006 and drafted the aforementioned report in large part on the basis of information and testimony collected during his visit. In the course of preparing for this mission, Mr. Diène had a number of meetings with international human rights organizations and examined numerous reports and papers that described the issue of racism and intolerance in Russia. During his stay in Russia, in addition to his official program of meetings, the U.N. Special Rapporteur held meetings with a number of human rights NGOs, experts on ethnic relations, representatives of national minorities and diaspora communities.

Since many of us took part in these meetings, we got a chance to convey to Mr. Diène our human rights concerns and to express our views on how racism, xenophobia and discrimination manifest themselves in Russia, on the causes of these phenomena, and on the potential remedies. We are grateful to him for his careful consideration of the opinions of human rights activists, representatives of national minorities, and victims of racism and discrimination.

We regard Mr. Diène's report on the outcomes of his mission to Russia as well-balanced and unbiased. In our opinion, it captures the existing situation with the highest degree of precision. The Special Rapporteur's recommendations are likewise worth thorough consideration and in many respects can serve as a program of essential measures to overcome discrimination and racism.

Therefore, we were bewildered and deeply concerned with the official reaction of Ambassador Valery Loshchinin, the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the U.N. Office at Geneva, who characterized Mr. Diène's report as follows: :A range of problems in the sphere of racism and xenophobia was extrapolated [in the report] that which for our country either don't exist at all or aren't really that serious or systematic. There is no need to comment because the report is inappropriate, both in content and conceptually. We do not deny that, unfortunately, there have been incidents of racist or ethnic intolerance. However, to make far-reaching conclusions based on this fact about allegedly dominant tendencies within society and then, based on unproven data and falsifications, to assert that there are certain sins within the Russian political system, the justice system and the education system, is absurd.; We regard this assessment of the conscientious and thorough work of the Special Rapporteur as unacceptably harsh in style as well as unjust and false in essence. Such a statement by an official representative of the Russian Federation undermines the expectations of constructive cooperation between the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Russian Federation in the area of combating racism and discrimination. This sentiment expressed in the statement serves as yet more evidence of one of the key conclusions made by Mr. Diène in his report: the Russian government's unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of racism as a factor of domestic public life becomes an obstacle to the fight against manifestations of racism.

Of further concern is that fact that Mr. Loshchinin stated that Mr. Diène's report was allegedly based on :unproven data and falsifications,; a serious and flawed allegation that undermines the accuracy of the data systematically collected by our organisations and shared with the Special Rapporteur. We would like to state in conclusion that all the materials we shared with the Special Rapporteur are based on data that is scrupulously collected and verified by the staff members of our organizations. We stand ready to refute any of the accusations made by Russian officials in regard to the information provided for Mr. Diène's report.

Yours sincerely,

Stephania Kulaeva, St. Petersburg MEMORIAL

Aleksandr Osipov, Human Rights Center MEMORIAL

Aleksandr Verkhovsky, Sova Center for Information and Analysis

Svetlana Gannushkina, Civic Assistance Committee

Tanya Lokshina, DEMOS Center

Yury Dzhibladze, Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights

Natalya Taubina, Public Verdict Foundation

Anita Soboleva, Jurists for Constitutional Rights and Freedoms

Julia Harrington, Justice Initiative of Open Society Institute

Souhayr Belhassen, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)