RULES ON SPECIAL OPERATIONS: CONNECTED TO COUNCIL OF EUROPE?

Recent developments on controlling zachistki may well have been connected with the meetings of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Council of Europe taking place at the time in the Tauride Palace in Petersburg. On March 29, the online daily Gazeta.ru reported: “Already in June of this year, the Council of Europe intends to adopt special resolutions that will seriously restrict the antiterrorist activity of states belonging to the Council of Europe, including Russia.” In particular, Gazeta.ru went on, the resolutions will concern “the inadmissibility of torture, of inhumane language or of language demeaning the human worth of an individual, of ‘arbitrariness in any form,’ the respect for the right to life, the right to a just trial and the nonextradition of a person if such extradition were to threaten him with execution.” As Peter Schieder, the present chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, observed to Gazeta.ru: “The Council of Europe has always seen the actions of the Russian authorities in Chechnya as representing an antiterrorist operation, but we have always said that during the conducting of such operations it is inadmissible that peaceful citizens should suffer.”