WASHINGTON—Following today’s announcement that 16 of the 57 OSCE participating States have invoked the Moscow Mechanism to investigate alleged human rights abuses in Chechnya, Helsinki Commission Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (MS) and Ranking Senate Commissioner Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) issued the following statement:
“It is long past time for a credible, independent investigation into the allegations of human rights abuses in Chechnya. The OSCE can no longer ignore reports of forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture, and other gross violations of human rights, and should hold the perpetrators of such vicious crimes accountable. Impunity for such crimes creates an increasingly unsafe and unstable environment in an area already fraught with violence, terrorism, and fear.
“We encourage the Government of Russia to cooperate fully with the fact-finding mission and look forward to the mission’s report.”
At a human rights meeting convened in Moscow in 1991, the OSCE participating States established a mechanism to establish short-term, fact-finding missions in response to specific human rights concerns. To date, the Moscow Mechanism has been invoked only seven times: in the cases of Russia (2018), Belarus (2011), Turkmenistan (2003), Serbia and Montenegro (1993), Moldova (1993), Estonia (1992), and Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992). The 16 OSCE participating States that today invoked the mechanism are the United States, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
In June 2018, Sen. Wicker and Sen. Cardin urged U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to invoke the Moscow Mechanism to investigate events in Chechnya.
In April 2017, a Helsinki Commission hearing examined escalating human rights abuses in Russia, including roundups of hundreds of men accused of being homosexual by Chechen authorities. Some of the men were tortured and killed; others fled the country or remain in hiding.
In 2017, Sen. Cardin asked President Trump to investigate the perpetrators of abuses against gay men in Chechnya for possible Global Magnitsky sanctions. On December 20, 2017, the U.S. administration imposed sanctions on Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya.
