Nations in Transit 2010: Democracy and Dissent
Yevgeny Zhovtis, Adnan Hajizade, Emin Milli, Eynulla Fatullayev, and Sergei Magnitsky are not household names. But the plight of these individuals, all of whom have received harsh treatment from arbitrary and opaque criminal justice systems in the former Soviet Union, should be better understood by the outside world.
The persecution of these modern-day dissidents from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Russia reveals the uncomfortable truth about the current condition of the rule of law and democracy in the region. They were peaceful activists and professionals working in the fields of law, journalism, and human rights, but like many other independent thinkers and reformers in former Soviet republics, they drew the attention of a repressive state apparatus designed not to protect the interests of the wider society, but to maintain at all costs the political and economic supremacy of those in power.
Two decades after the collapse of communism, the rulers of these countries are again using brutal security forces, pliant courts, and tightly controlled news media to systematically crush political dissent. While in a few cases the leading personalities have scarcely changed, they are no longer attempting to defend a totalitarian system. Instead, they simply enrich themselves while promising prosperity, and employ naked aggression while promising law and order. Just as the existence of dissidents said something about the Soviet system a generation ago, today’s dissidents tell us something about the political environment in the former Soviet states.
A grim and growing list of activists and legal representatives have paid the ultimate price for seeking basic human rights and the rule of law, including Magnitsky, a 37-year-old Russian lawyer who died in pretrial detention in November 2009 after complaining for weeks that he was being denied adequate medical treatment. He worked for the investment fund Hermitage Capital, which had been caught up in capricious legal proceedings reminiscent of those that destroyed the oil company Yukos and exposed the Kremlin’s disdain for the rule of law.
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