MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 03rd November, 2018) Triggering of the so-called Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for probing claims about alleged human rights violations in Russia's Chechen Republic is unfounded and represents an abuse of the organization's procedures, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
On Thursday, the United States said it had joined a group of 16 countries thus invoking the Moscow Mechanism, which provides an option of sending a group of experts to look into the human rights situation of a country.
"It is obvious that these actions are caused by the willingness to boost the raging anti-Russia campaign ahead of the OSCE Ministerial Council that will be held in Milan on December 6-7. With regard to these circumstances, we consider the attempts to invoke the Vienna and Moscow mechanisms unfounded," the ministry said in a statement published late on Friday.
The ministry suggested that the launch of the two human rights procedures against Moscow was also caused by the some countries' willingness to use them not for strengthening cooperation within the OSCE but for the politicization of specific humanitarian issues.
Moscow noted that such an approach contradicted the spirit of the OSCE.
Russia was ready for continuing the constructive dialogue on human rights issues, the statement pointed out.
The Moscow Mechanism, adopted in 1991, complements the Vienna Mechanism of 1989, which ensures the exchange of information between member states on human rights issues. The Vienna Mechanism on reported abuses in Chechnya was invoked in August.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that it had asked for the initiators of the procedure invocation to demonstrate proof of specific rights violations, rather than reports of media outlets and non-government organizations, but had not received any data from them.
In its Thursday's statement, the United States claimed that members of the LGBTI community and activists had been abused in Chechnya.
These claims follow, specifically, the reports of a Russian newspaper in April 2017, claiming that men suspected of being homosexual had faced detentions in the Russian region. The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his spokesman Alvi Karimov have refuted the media reports. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in turn, has said that there was no reason not to believe Kadyrov's statements to Russian President Vladimir Putin that there were no such abuses in Chechnya.
Russian ombudswoman Tatiana Moskalkova has said she had received from the newspaper the Names of people who had allegedly been subject to rights violations in Chechnya and submitted them to the Russian Investigative Committee.
