Published on 12 October 2006
We have all been shocked by the news of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder. Her commitment to exposing authoritarian abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the “dirty war” in Chechnya had made her a symbol of democratic conscience in both Russia and the West.
We are now demanding that the competent authorities - under the United Nations or Council of Europe aegis for example - create an international commission of enquiry in order to establish the truth about Anna Politkovskaya’s murder on 7 October in Moscow.
Twenty one journalists have already been murdered since Putin became Russia’s president in March 2000. Most of these murders has not been solved. The murder of Politkovskaya, one of the few reporters to have covered the situation in Chechnya since 1999, one who had received many international awards for her work, has taken Russia across a new threshold of horror.
Sign the petition calling for an international commission of enquiry.
Scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human rights activists were arrested, put under house arrested or expelled from Beijing before and during the Olympic Games. The Games have now finished and we call for their release !
