Human rights activists: authorities evade responsibility for forced migrants in Northern Caucasus

On September 18 in Moscow, the Independent Press Centre held a roundtable "Obligations of the State before Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and the Way the State Observes Them." The debates organized by the Human Rights Centre (HRC) "Memorial," Russian Ombudsman and the Federal Migration Service (FMS) were attended by representatives of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, Ministry of Public Health and Social Development and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

The organizers have expressed a regret that again the event of this sort was ignored by representatives of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Regional Development, which are in charge of solving the problems of housing accommodation of forced migrants.

The main problem, to which the attention was drawn by human rights activists, was the absence of the law, which could serve an instrument for implementing the responsibility of the state in relation to IDPs. In their opinion, the current law in force "On Forced Migrants" helps the authorities to evade their constitutional duties of defending internal refugees.

The definition of a forced migrant enables the authorities to decide at their own discretion who of the IDPs will and who will not be granted their assistance and protection. As a result of all this, out of 580,000 persons who had left the Chechen Republic (under official data) during the second armed conflict, only 12,500 were granted the status of forced migrants, and among them there were almost no ethnic Chechens. In other words, 98 percent of IDPs were rejected any "economic, social and legal guarantees of protection of their rights and legitimate interests," M. Petrosyan, an expert of the HRC "Memorial" has explained.