The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, said in her latest report that Moscow had launched a systematic crackdown on critics since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of its western neighbour in February 2022.
“The human rights situation has steadily deteriorated, constituting a seismic decline,” she concluded in the report, which she published last week and will present to the Human Rights Council on Monday.
Over the past three-and-a-half years, “Russian authorities have intensified their use of criminal prosecution, long-term imprisonment, intimidation, torture and ill-treatment to silence opposition to the war,” the report said.
Katzarova, who was appointed by the council in 2023 as the first UN-backed monitor of the rights situation in Russia, warned the official narrative in Russia was “reframing legitimate exercises of human rights as ‘existential security threats’ and portraying such individuals as ‘enemies of the State'”.
The independent expert, who does not speak on behalf of the UN, said Russian authorities had “dismantled institutional independence, bringing the judiciary, legislature and law enforcement under direct political control”.
“This systemic capture transformed public institutions into instruments of repression and war.”
The report in particular denounced “the continuing widespread and systematic recourse to torture and ill-treatment by Russian law enforcement officials, security forces, penitentiary officials and members of the armed forces”.
And it slammed “a clear pattern of health professionals participating in and condoning the most abhorrent torture, especially of Ukrainian detainees”.
Katzarova said that independently corroborated testimony from victims described how medical personnel in some instances instructed prison staff “on how to apply electric shocks to inflict greater pain”.
She called on Russia to “prosecute any medical personnel who have participated in, condoned or failed to report torture or ill-treatment”.
In a seeming acknowledgement that prosecution in Russia was unlikely, she also urged other countries to exercise so-called universal jurisdiction to “prosecute alleged perpetrators of torture” committed inside the country.