Sergei Kovalev: Open Letter: "...Yet who promised that our life would be easy? I believe that these people will at some stage come. I see no other possibility for overcoming our shameful moral crisis...."

Do you hate it when somebody stops you when you’re saying something important? So do we! It is especially galling when we’re not just letting off steam, but trying to redress wrongs, defend people’s rights – in short make waves. And those with infinitely more money than morals hire the services of hackers to organize a DDOS attack against us.

In Soviet times you talked of writing “for the drawer”. There was no chance of being published if you didn’t write what they wanted to hear. And if you wrote what they seriously didn’t want to hear, you could end up imprisoned. So people wrote in private and hoped for better times in the future.

Abdugani Kamaliyev (Tursinov), an Uzbek married to a Russian national was forcibly expelled from Tyumen in Russia to Uzbekistan in the early hours of Wednesday morning. This was despite the fact that the European Court of Human Rights had applied Rule 3 binding the member state involved to halt any expulsion procedure prior to Strasbourg’s review.

Vienna, 24 November 2007. 24 November 2007 turned out to be a particularly black day for human rights and democracy in the Russian Federation. The chair of the Human Rights Centre “Memorial”, Oleg Orlov, and three journalists of the REN-TV federal television channel were abducted in Nazran / Ingushetia, beaten up and threatened with execution.

Amnesty International is shocked and appalled by the latest attack against a human rights defender and members of the media in the southern Russian Republic of Ingushetia.