Watchdog

The homes and offices of activists who help domestic violence victims in the Russian North Caucasus region of Daghestan have been raided by police, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on February 15.

According to HRW, police seized computers and other electronic equipment during the raids on February 13 in Khasavyurt and Makhachkala, the regional capital.

Those targeted in the police action are affiliated with the Stichting Justice Initiative (SJI), an NGO that provides aid to victims of human rights abuses in the North Caucasus and survivors of domestic violence elsewhere in Russia.

"These outrageous police raids show the poisonous climate for NGOs in Russia, and particularly in the North Caucasus," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "These are overt attempts to suppress independent civic activity, instill fear, and keep activists in a perpetual state of uncertainty."

The court order allowing the search and seizure, which HRW said it saw, contained no information about a specific alleged offense that would have justified the action.

The searches on February 13 were the second time in six months that police have targeted SJI and its partners.

In August 2019, police and security services raided and searched the group's offices in Moscow and Nazran, a city in the North Caucasus region of Ingushetia. In the Russian capital, the authorities did not show a search warrant and claimed that the raid was linked to a search in the adjacent offices of an audit company.

Romanian prosecutors have indicted 14 people, including a German couple, on charges of trafficking and treating German teenagers "like slaves" under the guise of a state-funded reeducation program.

Children aged 12 to 18 were trafficked from 2014 to 2019, suffering "profoundly abusive" treatment at a center funded by the German state in a remote mountain area of northern Romania, according to the prosecutor's office for fighting organized crime (DIICOT).

The probe, which started in August, has now been sent for trial on charges of membership of an organized criminal group, child trafficking, deprivation of liberty, and money laundering.

German citizens Bert Schumann, 61, and his wife, Babett Schumann, who founded the program called Projekt Maramures, after the name of the northern region the center is located, allegedly were the masterminds of the operation.

Others include an employee from Romania's child protection agency and locals who used the children as workers, a source in the prosecutor's office told the media.

The children, who had behavioral problems and came from troubled families, were enrolled in the program after the German state had taken them from their families and entrusted them to the rehabilitation program, prosecutors said.

"In reality, they were subjected to tough and brutal methods of so-called education...," they said.

"They were held in conditions that amount to slavery, exploited by being forced to work beyond their physical power until exhaustion, deprived of food and liberty."

The funds paid by the German state were "mostly used for other purposes than the ones for which they were entrusted."

Prosecutors in August found 137,000 euros ($152,000) in Schumann's home.

Based on reporting by AFP and digi24.ro