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Svetlana Gannushkina, the chairwoman of the committee “Civil Assistance” had worked out an application to the mayor of Moscow Mr. Luzhkov to not allow a demonstration by radical-nationalist organizations on the 4th of November holiday which was signed by almost all Russian NGOs. Russian NGOs asked Mr. Luzhkov not to dishonor Moscow with this racist march, which could entail disorder and racist trouble on the streets of Moscow. (04-NOV-05)

Mrs. Ludmila Alexeeva, the chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group and Mr. Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, the chairman of the Republic of the Sudan Social Development Organization, received the annual award from the organization Human Rights First in New York on 24 October. (27-OCT-2005)    

During the 13-14 October raids, armed people seized hostages and occupied the administrative buildings of the police, local department of the FSB, local department of internal affairs and other places within the city. The average age of the insurgents was 18-20 years. The exact number of injured and killed people is still being counted. The resonance of the events in Nalchik has divided Russian society (18-OCT-2005)
 

Among the most common strategies of harassment of human rights defenders, both as individuals and at the organisational level, are accusations of formal, bureaucratic wrongdoings, such as tax evasion. Below is a story of this happening to the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. Read the organisation´s own press release on the issue, signed by Stanislav Dmitrievsky (right) and Oksana Chelysheva (left). (15-OCT-05)
   

12 October 2005 a district officer of Blagoveshchensk (Republic of Bachkiria, Russian Federation), Vasiliy Jukov was put on probation for 3 years. He was the second policeman who was condemned for exceeding his authority by covering up the mass beatings on 12-14 December 2004 in Blagoveshchensk, when OMON and police had beaten citizens of Blagoveshchensk and its suburbs. Read more (16-OCT-2005)
 

On 10 October 2005 activists from Amnesty International led a protest in Moscow against the death penalty, torture and repressions in the Republic of Uzbekistan. They used symbolic human figures of “silent witnesses” on which they put the names of real people who are subject to torture and condemned to death. (12-OCT-2005)
 

Last week, several human rights NGOs and well-known individual human rights defenders demonstrated against the recent attempts to silence the Nizhny-Novgorod-based NGO Russian-Chechen Friendship Society (RCFS). www.humanrightshouse.org has received RCFS?s own newsletter report and numerous pictures of the demonstration. read the report and see the pictures below. (10-OCT-05)
 

On 5 October Rolf Ekeus, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, declared that the Russian human rights organization “Memorial”, Historical, Educational, Human Rights and Charitable Society, has been awarded the prestigious International Van der Stoel Award. (10-OCT-05)
 

On 3 September in Moscow human rights activists from the Movement For Human Rights began protesting against police arbitrariness. They went to the square near the Russian Museum of History with placates reading: ‘We don’t need this type of vertical power, No to police arbitrariness, Criminal responsibility for mass beatings and unconstitutional orders’. (07-OCT-05)