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No Summer Break: Repression in and around Russia Has Been Heating Up

Summer is over. Western leaders are just returning from vacation, but in other parts of the world, the business of repression has continued as usual, with autocrats taking advantage of a distracted West to ramp up their attacks on civil society.

At the moment, there is an extraordinary concentration of crises demanding international attention—in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, West Africa—so it’s worth asking: why should world leaders concern themselves with these seemingly minor infractions when war and terror are knocking at the door?

In Tajikistan, Alexander Sodiqov, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, remains under house arrest facing charges of espionage and treason following his arrest in June. Sodiqov had traveled to the troubled Gorno-Badakhstan Autonomous Province in his native country to undertake interviews for a University of Exeter research program when he was detained and held in jail for a month. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

In Russia, Jennifer Gaspar, an American citizen who has lived in Russia for 10 years and has worked for a variety of NGOs in Russia, was served a deportation notice. Gaspar’s husband, Ivan Pavlov, is a leading civil rights lawyer and director of the Institute for Freedom of Information in St. Petersburg. The couple has a five-year-old daughter who is a Russian citizen. Having been designated a “threat to national security,” Gaspar was given two weeks to leave the country, with or without her family.

Russia has also broadened its list of “foreign agents” in an effort to force NGOs to cease their activities in the country. Last week Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg was branded a foreign agent by the Russian Ministry of Justice; the group’s members had publicly revealed the open secret that the government is sending Russian soldiers to fight in Ukraine.

In Azerbaijan, where Ilgar Mammadov, who stood against Ilham Alieyv in the 2013 presidential election and has been in jail for more than a year, there has been a flurry of arrests. Leyla and Arif Yunus—prominent human rights defenders—face charges of treason following their detention. In April, the French ambassador escorted Arif and Leyla, a recipient of France’s Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour, to the airport for safe passage out of Azerbaijan, but they were detained before they could board their plane.

The activist Rasul Jafarov was arrested in August. Like Leyla and Arif Yunus, Jafarov had discovered he was subject to a de facto travel ban after he was prevented from crossing into Georgia the week before. A month earlier, Jafarov had testified to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on the intensifying crackdown on civil society in his homeland. In light of this, the farcical decision to award the chair of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to Azerbaijan is thrown into further relief.

Azerbaijan’s clampdown is more than just seasonal opportunism this year; in 2015 it hosts the inaugural European games in Baku and aims to avoid the kind of embarrassment caused by Jafarov and others with their high-profile protests at the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest in Baku.

NGOs in Azerbaijan are also being squeezed—smeared in the media, their assets and bank accounts confiscated, their workers intimidated. Hotel chains in the country such as Hyatt, Marriott, Radisson, Hilton, Sheraton, and Fairmont are denying NGOs critical of the government permission to hold meetings; hotels have to consult with the president’s office before making a booking like this.

In Azerbaijan, there are very few lawyers left to represent dissidents in national and international courts. The latest to be arrested is the head of the Legal Education Society Intigam Aliyev, who has brought—and won—many cases to the European Court of Human Rights, on behalf of victims of the regime.

While today it seems the world is lurching from one crisis to the next, these crises began quietly with arrests, censorship, and everyday repression. We can prevent further conflagrations by making a stand now for people like Rasul Jafarov in Azerbaijan or Soldiers’ Mothers in Russia, instead of wringing our hands when unchecked repression grows bigger and bolder—as we can be sure it will.

With or without political and media interest, clampdowns like the ones I have described are having devastating effects on individual lives. And civil society is eroded, piece by fragile piece.

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