Russia turns tables on West with rights watchdog

Mon, Apr 28 07:49 PM

By Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has endured years of criticism over its human rights record but now it is hitting back by setting up watchdogs in New York and Paris to challenge the West over its own rights record.

Natalya Narochnitskaya, one of the leaders of the project, said the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation will offer a fresh perspective on human rights that is not hostage to the political agenda of Western governments.

"American policy under the flag of democracy and human rights in actual fact is a Trotskyist permanent revolution which serves the aim of giving them (political) mastery," she said.

"There is a double standard in that some countries are declared without sin or are surrounded by a wall of immunity," Narochnitskaya, a former member of Russia's parliament who will head the Institute's Paris office, told Reuters in an interview.

"But if the issue is with Russia or (Moscow's ex-Soviet ally) Belarus then here you will have a full hue and cry," said Narochnitskaya. She said institute was up and running and would move into premises in Paris in the next few weeks.

The initiative coincides with a growing frustration among senior Kremlin officials who believe Western governments are using human rights as a weapon to prevent Russia from reclaiming its place as a major world power.

Rights groups and Western governments have alleged that Russian elections are not free and fair, that media freedom is being suppressed and opposition activists persecuted, and that troops fighting an Islamist insurgency use brutal methods.

President Vladimir Putin, who steps down next month but will stay on as prime minister, has acknowledged his country's record is imperfect but says no country is blameless.

He has pointed to the treatment of detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, as well as what Moscow calls official discrimination against ethnic Russians living inside the European Union.

At an EU-Russia summit in Portugal in October last year, Putin said he wanted to set up a Russian human rights watchdog that would operate in Europe.

Narochnitskaya said her project had no links to the Russian government, though it was met with "a certain approval" in the Kremlin and it planned to apply for a government grant.

She said for now the institute had modest funding from a Russian company, which she declined to name.

One of the institute's first projects was to publish a book which argues that bloodless revolutions in ex-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine which installed pro-Western leaders were plotted and financed by the West.

Narochnitskaya said another project in development was to "monitor the monitors" who pass judgement on the fairness of elections. Moscow has accused monitors from European democracy watchdogs of having a political agenda.

She said the Institute also planned to send a fact-finding mission to Kosovo to assess if the rights of the Serb minority there are being respected. Russia backed its ally Belgrade in opposing independence for Kosovo.

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