It’s been well over a year and a half since the first report that Chechnya was rounding up men suspected of homosexuality and detaining them in concentration camps, torturing them, and in some cases killing them. Now, 15 countries are using an international cooperative agreement to demand answers from Russia about the ongoing persecution and its apparent hands-off approach.
Refugees have continued to flee Chechnya, which is a federal subject of Russia that is primarily Muslim, and have shared dire stories of persecution. In May, however, Russia announced that it had investigated those claims but found no evidence of violence against LGBTQ people in Chechnya.
Russia’s investigation boldly concluded that there were no LGBTQ people in Chechnya whatsoever. “There weren’t even representatives of LGBTI in Chechnya,” Alexander Konovalov, Russia’s minister of Justice, told the United Nations Human Rights Council. “We weren’t able to find anyone.”
A spokesperson for Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov similarly claimed last year, “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic.” He counted on families to exile any queer people who might turn up. “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them since their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” he said.
The 15 OSCE countries were not persuaded by this explanation.
“This claim stands in stark contrast to the detailed accounts of multiple survivors contained in NGO and media reporting, including Maxim Lapunov who bravely came forward to publicly share his account of torture and ill-treatment by Chechen security officials,” their statement explained. “Instead of providing answers, Minister Konovalov’s statement only raises more questions about the seriousness of Russia’s investigation into these events.”
The group said the Russian Federation had so far declined to offer any substantive response on the matter, denying credible allegations and accusing other nations of “spreading fake news from the Internet.” The statement expressed concern that Russia’s inaction “contributes to the climate of impunity in the Chechen Republic.”
Moving forward, the statement specifically called on Russia to respond to four questions:
- What have Russian authorities done to ensure Chechen officials abide by OSCE human rights expectations?
- How have Russian authorities investigated these allegations and arrive at their conclusions that no violations occurred and no queer people exist in Chechnya?
- What steps have Russian authorities taken to ensure civil society and media actors can document these human rights concerns?
- How have Russian authorities investigate the fate of the 27 individuals who were reportedly executed without charges or due process in January 2017?
The Vienna Mechanism gives Russia 10 days to respond.
The 15 countries that signed the letter include Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said last year that American officials were “disturbed” by the reports out of Chechnya and called on the republic to immediately investigate and ameliorate the concerns to prevent future abuses.
Human Rights Watch called this invocation of the Vienna Mechanism a “significant” and “rare” step. If Russia does not respond in a timely and credible way, these countries could then invoke the “Moscow Mechanism,” which would mandate an independent investigation to report on the abuses. That has only ever been done twice, in Turkmenistan in 2003 and Belarus in 2011.