The rights groups expressed concern a day after human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin and Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin reportedly agreed to sign a memorandum on boosting cooperation between law enforcement bodies and rights groups.

As part of the deal, the Interior Ministry plans to assign police officers to each rights group with the task of "immediately reacting to citizens' complaints and their appeals to rights activists involving the work of the police," Chekalin said, Gazeta reported Friday.

Lukin had publicly lambasted law enforcement bodies Wednesday for alleged human rights abuses when detaining, interrogating and holding people in custody, calling their behavior "fierce, cruel and cynical tortures." Lukin said one-third of the 20,000 complaints his office gets every year involve police abuse.

But rights activists said they suspect the initiative is a government's attempt to keep them under its thumb.

Alexander Petrov, of Human Rights Watch's Moscow office, said the initiative "smells of old Soviet times."

"Why assign [law enforcement representatives] to human rights groups?" Petrov said. "So that they would peek where the groups get their funding and whose hand they cannot bite?"

President Vladimir Putin charged in his state of the nation address last month that many civic organizations are more interested in getting funding from abroad or from corporate sponsors than in defending rights. He said such groups "cannot bite the hand that feeds them."

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, also criticized the initiative. "I don't doubt that this is being done with the hope of watching us, so that we will be under their control, but we act openly and there is nothing for them to uncover here," she said.

Alexeyeva added that "it could also turn out to be useful, when the Interior Ministry -- such a closed organization -- pledges to cooperate with us."

See also:

Human Rights

The Associated Press, June 21, 2004